Edith Grossman Livres

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

This collection features twelve extraordinary stories by a Nobel Prize-winning author, renowned for his classic works. Set in contemporary Europe, the narratives explore the unique and remarkable experiences of Latin Americans abroad. An ailing Caribbean ex-President finds an unlikely friendship with an ambitious ambulance driver and his strong-willed wife in Geneva. Margarito Duarte travels from the Colombian Andes to Rome with a cello-shaped box to present to the Pope. In Vienna, a woman known as Frau Frieda supports herself by sharing her dreams with wealthy families. A Mexican performer, stranded in Barcelona due to a car breakdown, ends up in an asylum. A vacationing family in Tuscany encounters a ghost at a Renaissance castle owned by a famous Venezuelan writer. Maria dos Prazeres, a former lady of the night in Barcelona, dreams of death and begins planning her funeral. A widow in a Saint Francis habit sails from Argentina to meet the Pope, while a beautiful Caribbean boy descends into madness in Spain. A German governess wreaks havoc on her charges’ summer, leading to her own downfall. Billy Sanchez takes his pregnant wife to a Paris hospital, never to see her again. In this mesmerizing collection, the author invites readers into enchanting worlds, leaving them spellbound.

Dans une petite ville des Caraïbes, à la fin du XIXe siècle, un jeune télégraphiste, pauvre, maladroit, poète et violoniste, tombe amoureux fou de l'écolière la plus ravissante que l'on puisse imaginer. Ils jurent de se marier et de vivre un amour éternel...

Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, fille unique du marquis de Casalduero, avait douze ans quand elle fut mordue par ce chien couleur de cendre portant une lune blanche au front. Enfermée au couvent pour faire exorciser cette rage qu'elle n'a pas, prise entre les démons de l'Inquisition et cette passion toute neuve pour son exorciste, Don Cayetano Delaura, l'amante-enfant vivra un amour qui l'entraînera jusqu'à la destruction.

Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. This title argues for the cultural importance of translation, and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role.

'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin' Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a sensual and hypnotic journey through the mind of a man discovering love for the first time after a lifetime filled with hundreds of different women. The nights spent sleeping side-by-side with his 'Delgadina' fill his soul with an unexpected longing. He feels her presence when she is not there. The now passionate meditations of his newspaper columns are bound up in love and received by a rapturous, growing readership, and in his imagination - as real for him as memories - he sees them together as they might have been. This is a story of one man's reassessment of his life as he awakens to the transformative power of love.