Read the World

Le dedico mi silencio, Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)

The most prestigious author in Spanish literature today returns with a novel set in his native Peru. I Give You My Silence is the story of a man who dreamed of a country united by music and went mad trying to write the perfect book to tell it.

Reina del Baile, Camila Fabbri (Argentina)

A woman wakes up in an overturned car in the middle of the night. There is smoke and the smell of gasoline. She barely feels her legs, the street lighting coming in from outside and the glass embedded in her back. She discovers that she is the driver and, instantly, she hears a sweet and delicate voice calling her name. A fifteen-year-old girl and a dog are also traveling in the back seat. The woman does not remember who they are, or what they are doing there. The only certainty is that they are alive. The story begins when we return to the past, where the narrator, Paulina, is still unharmed. She separates from her partner and embarks on a trip in her Peugeot 307 to the south coast with Maite, her office colleague, and Gallardo, her dog.

En el reino del toro sagrado, Jordi Soler (Mexico)

Artemisa, a beautiful woman of Greek descent, lives in a village lost in the mountain range of Veracruz, in a land between reality and myth where the primitivism of the jungle and western civilization coexist in a complex balance. There, everyone desires her, she is worshiped as a goddess, but any love affair with her is destined for tragedy: the story told by the narrator, when they were both young, and her story with a violent and powerful older man, who falls obsessively in love with her. Obsessive is also the sort of relationship established by Artemisa with a strange and fearsome being, an almost mythological animal to which she is apparently attached by an uncontrollable passion that hurtles her to an inhuman fate of betrayal and unimaginable horror.

The exotic and the primitive, the beautiful and the atrocious, Greek and Mexican pre-Hispanic mythologies intertwine in this novel, where Jordi Soler narrates—with magnetic prose, leaving the reader breathless—savagery and relationships of love and dependency that unleash a true tempest within the page.

Doña Barbara (Venezuela)

Rómulo Gallegos classic literary masterpiece about the conflict between town and country, violence and intellect, male and female. Following the epic struggle between two cousins for an estate in Venezuela, Doña Barbara is a beautiful and mysterious woman–rumored to be a witch–with a ferocious power over men. When her cousin Santos Luzardo returns to the plains in order to reclaim his land and cattle, he reluctantly faces off against Doña Barbara, and their battle becomes simultaneously one of violence and seduction. All of the action is set against the stunning backdrop of the Venezuelan prairie, described in loving detail. Gallegos’s plains are filled with dangerous ranchers, intrepid cowboys, and damsels in distress, all broadly and vividly drawn. A masterful novel with an important role in the inception of magical realism, Doña Barbara is a suspenseful tale that blends fantasy, adventure, and romance.