Edith Grossman

Publisher's description: In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, the most acclaimed and revered living Nobel laureate begins to tell us the story of his life. Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel García Márquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has...

"In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world -- especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon -- but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became...

"October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with...

The severed head of Josuãe Nadal, floating in the Pacific Ocean off the shore of Mexico, remembers his life, his friends, enemies, and lovers, and his involvement in the drug trade and the corruption frequently encountered in his country.

Seeking refuge from the police during the last days of Franco's rule, Minaya moves into his uncle's country estate and stumbles upon a dark secrets involving an old poet, his uncle, and the death of the woman they both had loved.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651 - 1695) was a feminist and a woman ahead of her time. She was very much a public intellectual and her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico", names that continue to resonate. This self-taught intellectual rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age. The volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works, including "First Dream", which showcases her prodigious...