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Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014 Winner of the Alfaguara Prize 2011 Winner of the Gregor von Rezzori Prize 2013 No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogot� than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a secret. Antonio's fascination with his new friend's life grows until the day Ricardo receives a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Shortly afterwards, he is shot dead on a street corner. Yammara's investigation into what happened leads back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped Colombia in a living nightmare.
As Colombia's famed political cartoonist, Javier Mallarino, strolls through downtown Bogotá in the hours before a public celebration of his career in the grand Teatro Colón, he contemplates the start of his professional life, and how he set down his oils and took up a pen to begin drawing caricatures for a living. But the celebration has far-reaching consequences: as he leaves the theatre a figure from his past, now a young woman, emerges from the crowd outside and forces Mallarino to confront an incident that took place in his home half a lifetime ago, calling into question his reputation and the value of his life's work. Vásquez's terse, poetic prose contrasts starkly with the intense and sharply focused content of this beautifully structured novel. Questioning the power of memory and the media, and their ability to distort, inform and destroy, Vásquez plays with the past and the present, challenging our perception of the truth.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions -- the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings. This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.
Scholarship on the moral and political philosophy of the ‘School of Salamanca’ has either long been emphasizing the discontinuity between medieval and modern philosophy and the way this discontinuity is represented in the works of these authors or discussing issues of moral justification that are often seen as the heart of early modern practical philosophy. This volume offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the concept of law. This allows for an in-depth analysis of a variety of normative issues in the authors’ moral and political thought. It also suggest a more continuous picture of the transition from medieval to modern philosophy and proposes a more nuanced view of the importance of political concepts in the authors’s practical philosophy.
A brilliant debut from 'one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature' (Mario Vargas Llosa) 'For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez, The Informers is a thrilling new discovery' Colm Toibin, Guardian 'One of this year's outstanding books' Financial Times When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.
Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotiation used by free blacks in the aftermath of the “Year of the Lash”—a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades. At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba’s free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities...
Resorting to natural law is one way of conveying the philosophical conviction that moral norms are not merely conventional rules. Accordingly, the notion of natural law has a clear metaphysical dimension, since it involves the recognition that human beings do not conceive themselves as sheer products of society and history. And yet, if natural law is to be considered the fundamental law of practical reason, it must show also some intrinsic relationship to history and positive law. The essays in this book examine this tension between the metaphysical and the practical and how the philosophical elaboration of natural law presents this notion as a "limiting-concept", between metaphysics and eth...
"A potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." —Los Angeles Times "A cunning tribute to a classic." —Wall Street Journal "[A] post-modern literary revenge story.” —The New York Times An ingenious novel of historical invention from the global literary star author of The Sound of Things Falling. On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail—from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Those intimate recollections became Nostromo, a novel that solidified Conrad’s fame and turned Altamirano’s reality into a work of fiction. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear—Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence. As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, Vásquez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back in a labyrinthine quest to reclaim the past—of both a country and a man.
Contains papers from a conference on De iure praedae, held in June 2005 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.