Alvaro Enrigue

Shocking, erudite, and affecting, these twenty-odd short stories, "micro-novels," and vignettes span a vast territory, from Mexico City to Washington, D.C. to the late nineteenth-century Adriatic to the blood-soaked foothills of California's gold-rush country, introducing an array of bewildering characters: a professor of Latin American literature who survives a tornado and, possibly, an orgy; an electrician confronting the hardest wiring job of his...

"La novela arranca con la vindicación de la escritura y la construcción de un paisaje. Ese paisaje es fronterizo -entre México y Estados Unidos-, y en él irán apareciendo personajes, del pasado y del presente. Asoman misioneros, colonos y también los otros, los indios de las tribus ya civilizadas o aún salvajes. Asoma una mujer que huye por el desierto, y un militar que persigue por ese desierto a unos indios que han robado ganado. Y también...

"Enrigue’s genius lies in his ability to bring readers close to its tangled knot of priests, mercenaries, warriors and princesses while adding a pinch of biting humor." —Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Los Angeles Times
“Riotously entertaining... A triumph of solemnity-busting erudition and mischievous invention that will delight and titillate.” —Financial Times
From the visionary author of Sudden...

"A classic of Mexican literature in the twentieth century, The Hole is a dazzlingly devastating novella. Set in a Mexican prison in the late 1960s, The Hole follows three inmates as they plot to sneak in drugs under the noses of their ape-like guards. The inmates desperately need to secure their next fix, and hatch a plan that involves convincing one of their mothers to bring the drugs into the prison, inside her person. But everything about their...