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Annie Muktuk and Other Stories by Norma Dunning. Edmonton. 2017. University of Alberta Press. 9781772122978. 204 pages. paperback. Cover image: 'Annie Pootoogook', a portrait.

DESCRIPTION - Eskimo, now that's a word. White word. White word for white people to wrap around their pink tongues. Esquimaux. Spell it any way you want and it still comes out the same, skid row and all. - from "Kabloona Red" In Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, Norma Dunning portrays the unvarnished realities of northern life through gritty characters who find themselves in difficult situations. Dunning grew up in a silenced form of Aboriginality, experiencing racism, assimilation, and colonialism; as she began exploring her Inukness, her writing bubbled up to the surface. Her stories challenge southern perceptions of the north and Inuit life through evocative, nuanced voices accented with Inuktitut words and symbolism. As with Alootook Ipellie's work, these short stories bring Inuit life into the reality of the present. Robert Kroetsch series

Norma Dunning is an Inuit writer, scholar, researcher, and grandmother. Her creative work keeps her most grounded in the traditional Inuit ways of knowing and being. She lives in Edmonton.

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Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti. London. 1958. Frederick Muller. Translated by Peter Green from the French novel Mission terminée (1957). 207 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - Here, at last, is an African novel untinged by political pleading, richly exuberant, vivid, humorous and disarming. The hero, Medza, is a young Negro from the French Cameroons who has just failed his exams at college, and returns to his native village in some fear of his father's reaction. He finds the whole place humming with scandal; a man's wife has gone off with a member of an up-country tribe. Someone must go and get her back. In these parts a scholar (even a failed one) has extraordinary prestige, and Medza finds himself saddled with this delicate mission. When he reaches the woman's village he has to wait for her return from another adventure, so he stays with some colourful and eccentric relations who pass him off as a prodigy of learning. Medza is entertained, given every luxury, and consulted like an oracle. Even though his canny uncle filches half the presents he receives, Medza does very well. Naturally, the girls flock round him, but he can't summon up enough courage to admit that the more sophisticated and enterprising among them frighten him out of his wits. How Medza finds himself married, how he comes to the end of his mission and what - surprisingly - happens then, is told in this delightful book. Characters, background and customs are described with infectious gaiety and the sharply original style rounds off an achievement which proves that here is a new African novelist of indisputable talent.

Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer. Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country. As one critic wrote after his death, ‘The militant path of this essayist, chronicler and novelist has been governed by one obsession: the quest for the dignity of African people.’The son of Oscar Awala and Régine Alomo, Alexandre was born in 1932 at Akométan, a small village 10 km from Mbalmayo, itself 45 km away from Yaoundé, capital of Cameroon. (The village's name comes from Akom ‘rock’ and Etam ‘source’: in old maps of the region, the name is written in two parts). From an early age, Beti was influenced by the currents of rebellion sweeping Africa in the wake of World War II. His father drowned when Beti was seven, and he was raised by his mother and extended family. Beti recalls arguing with his mother about religion and colonialism; he also recalls early exposure to the opinions and analysis of independence leader Ruben Um Nyobe, both in the villages and at Nyobe's private residence. He carried these views into the classroom, and was eventually expelled from the missionary school in Mbalmayo for his outspokenness. In 1945 he entered the lycée Leclerc in Yaoundé. Graduating in 1951, he came to France to continue his higher education in literature, first at Aix-en-Provence, then at the Sorbonne in Paris. By the early 1950s, Beti had turned to writing as a vehicle of protest. He wrote regularly for the journal Présence Africaine; among his pieces was a review of Camara Laye's Black Child that criticized Laye for what Beti saw as pandering to European tastes. He began his career in fiction with the short story Sans haine et sans amour (‘Without hatred or love’), published in the periodical Présence Africaine, edited by Alioune Diop, in 1953. Beti's first novel Ville cruelle (‘Cruel City’), under the pseudonym Eza Boto, followed in 1954, published in several editions of Présence Africaine. It was, however, in 1956 that he gained a widespread reputation; the publication of the novel Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (‘The poor Christ of Bomba’) created a scandal because of its satirical and biting description of the missionary and colonial world. Under pressure from the religious hierarchy, the colonial administrator in Cameroon banned the novel in the colony. This was followed by Mission terminée, 1957 (winner of the Prix Sainte Beuve 1958), and Le Roi miraculé, 1958. He also worked during this time for the review Preuves, for which he reported from Africa. He worked also as a substitute teacher at the lycée of Rambouillet. In 1959, he was named certified professor at the lycée Henri Avril in Lamballe. He took the Agrégation de Lettres classiques in 1966 and taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. from this date until 1994. Following Nyobe's assassination by French forces in 1958, however, Beti fell silent as a writer for more than a decade, remaining in exile from his homeland. After his death,Odile Tobner noted that exile was not easy on Beti; he remained tortured by his concern for his embattled country.In 1972 he re-entered the world of literature with a bang. His book Main basse sur le Cameroun, autopsie d'une décolonisation ('Cruel hand on Cameroon, autopsy of a decolonization') was censored upon its publication by the French Ministry of the Interior Raymond Marcellin on the request, brought forward by Jacques Foccart, of the Cameroon government, represented in Paris by the ambassador Ferdinand Oyono. The essay, a critical history of recent Cameroon, asserted that Cameroon and other colonies remained under French control in all but name, and that the post-independence political elites had actively fostered this continued dependence. Beti was inspired to write in part by the execution of Ernest Ouandie by the government of Cameroon. In 1974 he published Perpétue and Remember Ruben; the latter was the first in a trilogy exploring the life and impact of Nyobe. After a long judicial action, Mongo Beti and his editor François Maspéro finally obtained, in 1976, the cancellation of the ban on the publication of Main basse. Beti returned to critical and political writing at the same time that he returned to fiction. In 1978 he and his wife Odile Tobner launched the bimonthly review Peuples Noirs. Peuples africains ('Black People. African People'), which was published until 1991. This review chronicled and denounced tirelessly the evils brought to Africa by neo-colonial regimes. During this period were published the novels La ruine presque cocasse d'un polichinelle (1979), Les deux mères de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama futur camionneur (1983), La revanche de Guillaume Ismaël Dzewatama (1984), also Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais ou la deuxième mort de Ruben Um Nyobé (1984) and Dictionnaire de la négritude (1989, with Odile Tobner). Frustrated by what he saw as the failure of post-independence governments to bring genuine freedom to Africa, Beti adopted a more radical perspective in these works. In exile, Beti remained vitally connected to the struggle in Cameroon. Throughout the seventies and eighties, acquaintance with Beti or his work could spell trouble for a citizen of Cameroon; on numerous occasions, Beti used his connections in France to rescue one of his young readers, many of whom knew him from his periodical and his polemical essays. Ambroise Kom, arrested merely for subscribing to Peuples noirs, was saved from incarceration by Beti's actions in France on his behalf. In 1991 Mongo Beti returned to Cameroon, after 32 years of self-imposed exile. In 1993 he published La France contre l'Afrique, retour au Cameroun; this book chronicles his visits to his homeland. After retiring from teaching in 1994, he returned to Cameroon permanently. Various business endeavors in Betiland failed; eventually, he opened in Yaoundé the Librairie des Peuples noirs (Bookstore of the Black Peoples) and organized agricultural activities in his village of Akometam. The goal of the bookshop was to encourage engaged literacy in the capital, and also to provide an outlet for critical texts and authors. During this period, Beti also supported John Fru Ndi, an anglophone opposition leader. He created associations for the defence of citizens and gave to the press numerous articles of protest. The government attempted to hinder his activities. On his first return to Cameroon, police prevented him from speaking at a scheduled conference; Beti instead addressed a crowd outside the locked conference room. He was subjected in January 1996, in the streets of Yaoundé, to police aggression. He was challenged at a demonstration in October 1997. In response he published several novels: L'histoire du fou in 1994 then the two initial volumes Trop de soleil tue l'amour (1999) et Branle-bas en noir et blanc (2000), of a trilogy which would remain unfinished. He was hospitalized in Yaoundé on October 1, 2001 for acute hepatic and kidney failure which remained untreated for lack of dialysis. Transported to the hospital at Douala on October 6, he died there on October 8, 2001. Some critics noted the similarity of his death to that of his heroine Perpetua, who also died while awaiting treatment in one of the country's overburdened hospitals. From beginning to end, Beti's work was informed by two principles. In terms of style, he was a realist. In a critical statement published in 1955, he asserted that ‘Given the modern conceptions of the beautiful in literature, given at the very least these essential conceptions, if a work is realistic it has many chances of being good; if not, supposing even that it has formal qualities, it risks lacking resonance, profundity, that of which all literature has the greatest need -- the human; from which it follows that it has much less chance of being good -- if only it had some -- than a realistic work.’ Beti's fiction remains true to this credo. Thematically, Beti's work is unified by an unwavering commitment to combatting colonialism, both overt and covert. Beti's aim always, even in his harsh criticism of Cameroon's independence government, was to strengthen African autonomy and prosperity. ‘Sans haine et sans amour’, 1953, is a short story and Beti's first significant work.

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Noor by Nnedi Okorafo. New York. 2021. DAW Books. 9780756416096. 214 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Greg Ruth. Jacket design by Jim Tierney. 

DESCRIPTION - From Africanfuturist luminary Okorafor comes a new science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria. Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong. Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the "reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist" and the "saga of the wicked woman and mad man" unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable. Expect the unaccepted.

Nnedi Okorafor was born in the United States to two Igbo (Nigerian) immigrant parents. She holds a PhD in English and was a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University. She has been the winner of many awards for her short stories and young adult books, and won a World Fantasy Award for Who Fears Death. Nnedi's books are inspired by her Nigerian heritage and her many trips to Africa.

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Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilàn (editors). Middletown. 2003. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819566348. Early Classics of Science Fiction. 368 pages. paperback.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

Opening a window onto a fascinating new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the present. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region's celebrated literary fantastic. In the 27 stories included in this anthology, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events. The introduction examines the ways the genre has developed in Latin America and Spain since the 1700s and studies science fiction as a means of defamiliarizing, and then critiquing, regional culture, history and politics-especially in times of censorship and political repression. The volume also includes a brief introduction to each story and its author, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works. Cosmos Latinos is a critical contribution to Latin American, Spanish, popular culture and science fiction studies and will be stimulating reading for anyone who likes a good story. CONTENTS: IN THE BEGINNING - Juan Nepomuceno Adorno - ‘The Distant Future’ (Mexico, 1862); Nilo Maria Fabra - ‘On the Planet Mars’ (Spain, 1890); SPECULATING ON A NEW GENRE: SF FROM 1900 THROUGH THE - 1950s; Miguel de Unamuno - ‘Mechanopolis’ (Spain, 1013); Ernesto Silva Roman - ‘The Death Star’ (Chile, 1929); Juan Jose Arreola – ‘Baby H.P’ (Mexico, 1052); THE FIRST WAVE: THE 1960s TO THE MID-1980s; Angel Arango - ‘The Cosmonaut’ (Cuba, 1964); Jeronimo Monteiro - ‘The Crystal Goblet’ (Brazil, 1964); Alvaro Menen Desleal - ‘A Cord Made of Nylon and Gold’ (El Salvador, 1965); Pablo Capanna - ‘Scronia’ (Argentina, 1967); Magdalena Moujan Otano - ‘Gu TA Gutarrack (We and Our Own) (Argentina, 1968); Luis Britto Garcia - ‘Future’ (Venezuela, 1970); Hugo Correa - ‘When Pilate Said No’ (Chile, 1971); Jose B. Adolph - ‘The Falsifier’ (Peru, 1972); Angelica Gorodischer - ‘The Violet’s Embryo’s’ (Argentina, 1973); Andre Carneiro - ‘Brain Transplant’ (Brazil, 1978); Daina Chaviano - ‘The Annunciation’ (Cuba, 1983); Federico Schaffler - ‘A Miscalculation’ (Mexico, 1983); RIDING THE CREST: THE LATE 1980s INTO THE NEW MILLENIUM - Braulio Tavares - ‘Stuntmind’ (Brazil 1989); Guillermo Lavin ‘ - Reaching the Shore’ (Mexico, 1994); Elia Barrcelo - ‘First Time’ (Spain, 1994); Pepe Rojo - ‘Gray Noise’ (Mexico, 1996); Mauricio-Jose Schwarz - ‘Glimmerings on Blue Glass’ (Mexico, 1996); Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero - ‘The Day We Went through the Transition’ (Spain, 1998); Pablo Castro - ‘Exeriom’ (Chile, 2000); Michel Encinosa - ‘Like the Roses Had to Die’ (Cuba, 2001).

ANDREA L. BELL is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Hamline University in Minnesota.

YOLANDA MOLINA-GAVILÀN is Associate Professor of Spanish at Eckerd College in Florida and the translator of Rosa Montero’s The Delta Function (1992).

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Talbot, David. The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. New York. 2015. Harper. 9780062276162. 687 pages. hardcover. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful—and secretive—colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures. Dulles’s decade as the director of the CIA—which he used to further his public and private agendas—were dark times in American politics. Calling himself “the secretary of state of unfriendly countries,” Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. An exposé of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil’s Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state—and the battle for America’s soul.

David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and the acclaimed national bestseller Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love. He is the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, and was a senior editor at Mother Jones and the features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, The Guardian, and other major publications. Talbot lives in San Francisco, California.

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le, thi diem thuy. The Gangster We Are All Looking For. New York. 2003. Knopf. 0375400184. 161 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph courtesy of the author. Jacket design by Steven Amsterdam. 

DESCRIPTION - A momentous literary debut: the life of a Vietnamese family in America luminously observed through the knowing eyes of a child. In 1978 six refugees a girl, her father, and four ‘uncles’ are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world of itchy dresses and run-down apartments is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage for a father’s order. In THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR, lê thi diem thuy has illuminated a world of great beauty and enormous sorrows. Here is an authentically original story of finding one’s place and voice in America.

le thi diem thuy was born in Phan Thiet, southern Vietnam. She and her father left Vietnam in 1978, by boat, eventually settling in Southern California. lê is currently a Radcliffe Fellow and resides in western Massachusetts.

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The Dilemma of a Ghost by Christina Ama Ata Aidoo. New York. 1971. Collier/Macmillan. Introduction by Karen C. Chapman. 93 pages. paperback. 01202.

DESCRIPTION - Ato Yawson, a young Ghanaian educated in the United States, returns home with his strong-willed Harlem-born wife, Eulalie, whom he married without telling his tradition-conscious family. Ato, in his ambivalence between twentieth-century black America and his African heritage, attempts to bridge the two worlds. Eulalie, bringing with her dreams of "belonging" to a heroic, hallowed land, painfully discovers that Africa is not all colorful birds and peaceful rhythms of deep, mysterious rivers. In these immediate clashes between the tribe and the individual, the “primitive” and the modern, Ato and Eulalie confront barriers and obstacles which time, custom, and culture have made nearly  insurmountable. The Dilemma of a Ghost is a play classic in its dramatic construction, heeding all the principles of tragedy while going beyond the rise and fall of a single tragic hero to include the tragedy of community and culture unable to change or to understand.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, nee Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1940, Saltpond) is a Ghanaian author, playwright and academic.

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Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie. New York. 1998. Carroll & Graf. 0786705108. 1139 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - In Berlin, history is almost tangible. The sense of the past—of Europe, of Germany, and most of all, of the twentieth century's myths, idealism, depravities, and horror— hangs in the air around the Hinterhofs and deserted railway stations. No other city has played such a part in twentieth-century Europe, nor has any been so mythologized, so glorified, so cast down. In this magisterial new work, Oxford historian Alexandra Richie recounts how Berlin forged itself into the Schicksal Stadt Deutschlands—the City of German Destiny—and the enormous consequences. Faust's Metropolis is an exciting, radical history of this city, a breathtaking portrait of its people, and a thorough evaluation of its achievements and errors from the time of its founding in the twelfth century until the present day. From the revolutionary fervor of its teeming slums and the insufferable pomp of Imperial Berlin, to the frantic modernism of Weimar, the brutality of the Nazis, and the symbolic defeat of communism as the Wall came down, Berlin has played host to all the movements that have uplifted and afflicted German and European history. Richie writes superbly of its role as a crucible of change. She also traces its surprisingly heterogeneous social forces, which belie the Prussian and Nazi myths of a single German Volk, and the tensions between Berliners and other Germans from the early days of nationhood to their country's present crossroads. Unmatched in scope and scholarship, Faust's Metropolis is history at its most enthralling. It presents an encyclopedic history of this ever-changing city, a vivid social portrait of its citizens, and a thorough evaluation of its political and cultural legacy. Wresting Berlin's actual past from its myths, Richie arrives as a brilliant, authoritative new historian formidably in command of her fascinating subject.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandra Richie is the author of the critically acclaimed Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Dr Richie received her DPhil at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and was later a Fellow of Wolfson College. She has lectured on international politics and history across the world, from Warsaw University to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. She lives in Warsaw with her husband and two children.

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The Hector Belascoarán Shayne mysteries of Paco Ignacio Taibo II

An Easy Thing by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. New York. 1990. Viking Press. 0670824623. Translated from the Spanish by William I. Neuman. 230 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Neil Stuart. Jacket illustration by Mark Harrison. 

DESCRIPTION - AN EASY THING marks the English-language debut of Paco lgnacio Taibo II, Mexico's leading detective novelist and a writer world renowned for his atmospheric and highly innovative crime fiction. Set in the chaotic urban heart of Mexico City, a place where the ghosts of Old Mexico constantly eat away at all pretense of modernity, An Easy Thing is distinguished by the vulnerable human presence of its jaded detective hero, Hector Belascoarán Shayne. Already weary from coping with his mother's death and his lover's flight, Hector finds himself reluctantly involved in three perplexing cases: a murder at a capitalist- and corruption-riddled factory; disturbingly violent threats against the innocent teenage daughter of a former porn star; and finally, an attempt to find a rather extraordinary missing person-namely, Emiliano Zapata, archetypal (and, most think, long deceased) hero of the failed Mexican Revolution. Complicated characters; tight and witty dialogue; undercurrents of violence and sex; lots of action; and dazzling streaks of irony, dark comedy, and Latin fabulism combine to create a compelling, original mystery, a mystery that resonates with the bigger mysteries of Mexico's troubled history and of the dark side of human nature. This is mystery writing with a soul-and a funny, wise, warm, and entertaining soul it is, grounded in Paco Taibo's knowledge of modern Hispanic and world literature and history, and by his political and everyday human passions.

Some Clouds by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. New York. 1992. Viking Press. 067083825x. Translated from the Spanish by William I. Neuman. 163 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Neil Stuart. Jacket illustrations by Chris Gall. Author photograph by Jerry Bauer. 

DESCRIPTION - In SOME CLOUDS, master crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II serves up another Belascoarán Shayne caper, set once again in the chaotic heart of Mexico City, involving two inexplicable murders and a mysterious fortune worth millions, Before his case is ended, Belascoarán Shayne must negotiate an intricate labyrinth of corruption and cover-up that bears an unsettling resemblance to Mexico City's real-life scandals. Hector Belascoardn Shayne had two exotic last names, a degree in engineering from the National University, and one eye less than most people. He was thirty-five years old, with an ex-wife, an ex-lover, one brother, one sister, a denim suit that made him look more like a social anthropologist than a detective, a 38 automatic in his office in Mexico City, a slight limp from an old bullet wound in his right leg, and a private investigator's license he'd gotten through a correspondence course. He had a marked predilection for soft drinks, lemon. scented aftershave, crab salad, the Bossa Nova, and certain Hemingway novels. His heroes were Justin Playfair, Michael Strogoff, John Reed, Buenaventura Durutti, Capablanca, and Zorro (though he knew he was never going to get very far with a cemetery-full of heroes like that).

No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. New York. 1993. Mysterious Press. 0892965177. Translated from the Spanish by William I. Neuman. 175 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jackie Merri Meyer. Jacket illustration by Jose Ortega. 

DESCRIPTION - For the past decade Paco Ignacio Taibo II has been the most popular and talked about author in Latin and South America, his mysteries have drawn comparisons to the work of such diverse writers as Dashiell Hammett and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and his books have achieved bestselling status in both Eastern and Western Europe. Now Taibo's most acclaimed and bestselling novel is available in its first English edition. A private eye who shares his office with a plumber, an upholsterer, and a sewer engineer, Hector Belascoarán Shayne is a one-eyed anarchist, a man who knows intimately the teeming landscape of modern.day Mexico City-land of pressing poverty, absurdist street theater, and tragic class warfare. For Shayne, it is a world that can draw tears one moment and blood the next-as it does on the hot afternoon when he finds the dead Roman in his office. A threatening letter and a Polaroid snapshot of another corpse let Hector know that he has been targeted for intimidation, taking the identities of the two dead men, he finds out what they had in common: a connection to a dead daredevil named Zorak, whose sinister sideline was training a now disbanded paramilitary group used to put down political demonstrations.

Return To the Same City by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. New York. 1996. Mysterious Press. 0892965908. The Mexican Detective. Hector Belascoaran Shayne Rises From The Dead. Translated from the Spanish by Laura Dail. 178 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Rachel McClain. Jacket illustrations by Jose Ortega.

DESCRIPTION - ‘Hector Belascoarán Shayne, detective, was a stranger. A stranger in motion. He couldn't quite recognize himself he couldn't quite love himself And since he neither loved himself nor stopped loving himself he couldn't be too careful. He was absolutely sure that in this story, they were going to kill him.' The last Hector Belascoarán Shayne mystery from Paco Ignacio Taibo II ended with the one-eyed detective lying in the oily rain of Mexico City, his body perforated with bullets. Now the author of this hugely popular, highly political, endlessly inventive series of novels proves that no miracle is beyond his reach. Hector Belascoarán Shayne rises from the dead. He's a gun-carrying argonaut of Mexico City, city of strikes and pollution, ‘cemetery of dreams' He doesn't want to be alive, but he is, and when a woman tells him a sob story about her sister's death at the hands of a handsome rumba dancer in white patent leather shoes named Luke Estrella, Hector agrees to do something about him. In a Mexico City hotel the detective meets a battered, alcoholic gringo who's after the same man. On Acapulco Bay, nearly blinded by bikinied beauties, the detective shadows Estrella, who once owned porn shops in Cuba, cut off the hands of Che Guevara, and now is meeting with CIA operatives and a trafficker of stolen archeological treasures. Before Hector can decide whether he is pursuing Estrella or Estrella is pursuing him, he finds himself on a flight to Tijuana, for a confrontation with a killer . . . From the arms trade to the drug trade, from Nicaragua to the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Paco lgnacio Taibo II writes a heartrending, hilarious, and haunting story of corruptions venality, and violence, as told by Mexico's finest one-eyed detective. And when the final gunshots stop ringing in Hector's ears, Taibo's remarkable detective must attempt his most daring feat of all: learning to live with himself.
 

Frontera Dreams: A Hector Belascoaran Shayne Detective Novel by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. El Paso. 2002. Cinco Puntos Press. 093831758x. Translated from the Spanish by Bill Verner. 123 pages. paperback. Cover: Luis Jimenez-'Coscolina con Muerto (Flirt with Death)'. 

DESCRIPTION - The sweetheart of Hector Belascoaran Shayne's adolescence - the same one who's become a famous Mexican movie star - has disappeared into the magical reality of the U.S./Mexico border. Hector wanders la frontera looking for her. He falls in and out of love, he talks with the ghost of Pancho Villa, he asks lonely questions about the dirty business of narcotraficantes, and he listens closely to the story of the whores of Zacatecas. They, like his sweetheart, seem to have disappeared forever. Included are two brief essays - ‘Hector's Body' and ‘Hector's Shadow' - which discuss our beleaguered hero and his bullet-riddled body.
  

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II is one of the most popular authors at work today. Born in Asturias, Spain, he has lived in Mexico since 1958. A historian, journalist, and writer of short stories, novels, and works of history, he is one of the founders of the International Association of Crime Writers. His work has been widely translated and published throughout the world; his most recent novel, LEONARDO'S BICYCLE, won the Latin American Dashiell Hammett Award for the best crime novel of the year. He lives in Mexico City with his wife and daughter.

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If you have Netflix, you should check out Detective Belascoarán! 

Héctor Belascoarán leaves his corporate job and dull marriage to become an independent detective and tackle shocking criminal cases in 1970s Mexico City.

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Body Snatcher by Juan Carlos Onetti. New York. 1991. Pantheon Books. 0679401784. Translated from the Spanish by Alfred Macadam. 307 pages. hardcover. Jacket Illustration by Samuel Bayer. Jacket design by Marion Anderson.  

DESCRIPTION - BODY SNATCHER Is a major literary event: the masterpiece of Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, who has for decades been acknowledged throughout South America and Europe as a world-class writer of fiction. Relatively unknown in America, Onetti, with the English language publication of Body Snatcher, confirms his competitive preeminence among the great novelists of the Boom of Latin American fiction - including Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and others. Set in Santa Maria, an imaginary provincial town on the banks of the River Plate (reminiscent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County), BODY SNATCHER, a tragicomic novel of grotesque ideals and lost illusions, recounts two attempts at self-fulfillment, two Promethean stories by turns. Larsen, a boldly original pimp of weary whores, tries to establish the perfect brothel; passionate Julita, a mad widow, refuses to accept the death of her husband by taking his younger brother as her lover. In their sordid, self- righteous society, which pits stupidity and lust against honor and love, both characters are doomed to failure. Informed by the gothic sobriety of Faulkner, the desperate cynicism of Celine, hysterically funny avant-garde nihilism, and the stark precision of Dostoevsky, Body Snatcher is a formidable work of fiction.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo - May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Aged 30, Onetti was already working as editing secretary of the famous weekly Uruguayan newspaper Marcha. He had lived for some years in Buenos Aires, where he published short stories and wrote cinema critiques for the local media, and met and befriended the notorious novelist and journalist Roberto Arlt, author of the novels El juguete rabioso, Los siete locos, Los lanzallamas. He went on to become one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay National Literature Prize in 1962. He was considered a senior member of the 'Generation of 45', a Uruguayan intellectual and literary movement: Carlos Maggi, Manuel Flores Mora, Ángel Rama, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Idea Vilariño, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Mario Arregui, Mauricio Muller, Jose Pedro Díaz, Amanda Berenguer, Tola Invernizzi, Mario Benedetti, Ida Vitale, Líber Falco, Juan Cunha, among others. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. ‘The bodyguard') as the winner of Marcha's annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't and wouldn't do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.

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