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Shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants and the odd corrupt politician or two. Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.
Long before he was the taco seller whose 'Gringo Dog' recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City, our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more grueling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building's lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos's old man can't help but misbehave: he antagonises his neighbors, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, and flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer.
Award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos explores illegal immigration with this emotionally raw and timely nonfiction book about ten Central American teens and their journeys to the United States. You can't really tell what time it is when you're in the freezer. Every year, thousands of migrant children and teens cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The journey is treacherous and sometimes deadly, but worth the risk for migrants who are escaping gang violence and poverty in their home countries. And for those refugees who do succeed? They face an immigration process that is as winding and multi-tiered as the journey that brought them here. In this book, award-winning Mexican author Juan P...
"A novel about the sometimes comic dangers of growing up in Mexico in the '80s"--
"I don't expect anyone to believe me," warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship, when he's kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin - a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as "Projects" and to others as "dickhead" - who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To bring Laia, a Mexican student in Barcelona and the daughter of a corrupt politician, to fall in love with him. He accepts, albeit unwillingly, and albeit after the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature. Part campus novel, part gangster thriller, I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me is Villalobos at his best, exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile. This hugely entertaining novel, the winner of Spain's prestigious Herralde Prize, makes light work of difficult subjects - immigration, corruption, family loyalty and love - in a story where the bad guys aren't as expected . . . and nor is anyone else.
A deeply affecting–and infuriating–portrait of the life and death of a courageous indigenous leader The first time Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres met the journalist Nina Lakhani, Cáceres said, ‘The army has an assassination list with my name at the top. I want to live, but in this country there is total impunity. When they want to kill me, they will do it.’ In 2015, Cáceres won the Goldman Prize, the world’s most prestigious environmental award, for leading a campaign to stop construction of an internationally funded hydroelectric dam on a river sacred to her Lenca people. Less than a year later she was dead. Lakhani tracked Cáceres remarkable career, in which the def...
Prior histories of the first Spanish mariners to circumnavigate the globe in the sixteenth century have focused on Ferdinand Magellan and the other illustrious leaders of these daring expeditions. Harry Kelsey's masterfully researched study is the first to concentrate on the hitherto anonymous sailors, slaves, adventurers, and soldiers who manned the ships. The author contends that these initial trans global voyages occurred by chance, beginning with the launch of Magellan's armada in 1519, when the crews dispatched by the king of Spain to claim the Spice Islands in the western Pacific were forced to seek a longer way home, resulting in bitter confrontations with rival Portuguese. Kelsey's enthralling history, based on more than thirty years of research in European and American archives, offers fascinating stories of treachery, greed, murder, desertion, sickness, and starvation but also of courage, dogged persistence, leadership, and loyalty.
“Khan is a refreshing original, and The Unquiet Dead blazes what one hopes will be a new path guided by the author's keen understanding of the intersection of faith and core Muslim values, complex human nature and evil done by seemingly ordinary people. It is these qualities that make this a debut to remember and one that even those who eschew the [mystery] genre will devour in one breathtaking sitting.” —The LA Times Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she's still uneasy at Khattak's tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton's death. Drayton's apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn't s...
“Including work by literary heavy–hitters... the anthology considers the act and weight of watching and being watched... and in Watchlist, these see–to–know quests range from funny to terrifying.” —Los Angeles Magazine In Watchlist, some of today’s most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, meditate on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live. With contributions from Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, and many more, WATCHLIST unforgettably confronts the question: What does it mean to be watched? In Doctorow’s eerily plausible ""Scroogled,""...
"Juan Pablo Villalobos's fifth novel adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity. In an unnamed city, occupied by an unnamed world power, an immigrant named Gastón makes his living selling exotic vegetables to eateries around the city. He has a dog called Kitten, who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a good friend called Max, who's in a deep depression after being forced to close his restaurant. Meanwhile, Max's son, Pol, a scientist away on a scientific expedition into the Arctic, can offer little support. Gastón begins a quest, or rather three: he must search for someone to put his dog to sleep humanely; he must find a space in which to open a new restaurant with Max; and he must look into the truth behind the news being sent back by Pol: that human life may be the by-product of an ancient alien attempt at colonization . . . and those aliens might intend to make a return visit."--Provided by publisher.