Leaving Tabasco


Book Description

A young woman encounters strange events in her Mexican hometown in this novel by an author who “immerses us...in her wickedly funny and imaginative world” (Latina). Leaving Tabasco tells of the coming of age of Delmira Ulloa, raised in an all-female home in Agustini, in the Mexican province of Tabasco. In Agustini it is not unusual to see your grandmother float above the bed when she sleeps, or to purchase torrential rains at a traveling fair, or to watch your family’s elderly serving woman develop stigmata, then disappear completely, to be canonized as a local saint. But as Delmira becomes a woman, she will set out on a search for her missing father, and must make a choice that could mean leaving her home forever, in a tale filled with both depth and delightful mystery that poses questions about just how real the real world is. “To flee Agustini is to leave not just a town but the viscerally primal dreamscape it represents.”— The New York Times Book Review “Vibrant...Each chapter is an adventure.”—The Boston Globe “We happily share with [Delmira] her life, including the infinitely charming town she inhabits [and] her grandmother’s fantastic imagination.”—The Washington Post Book World




The Book of Anna


Book Description

Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.




They're Cows, We're Pigs


Book Description

A dark, thought-provoking adventure that “artfully evokes the blood-soaked reality of 17th-century pirates” (Entertainment Weekly). This “wryly humorous, satiric, and often macabre novel” (Library Journal) follows Jean Smeeks, a Flemish thirteen-year-old who signs up as an indentured servant with the French West Indies Company, but instead winds up a slave on the notorious island of Tortuga. Over time, he learns the arts of herbal medicine and surgery—a skill that allows him to join a band of Caribbean pirates. Contrasting Jean’s romantic pull toward the “Brethren of the Coast”—an all-male society pursuing socialist, anti-colonialist ideals—with the brutal reality of their lawless existence, They’re Cows, We’re Pigs is a “unique and memorable” novel whose “pirate world leaves you as a good book should: thinking” (The Boston Herald).




Cleopatra Dismounts


Book Description

An enchanting, audacious retelling of the Cleopatra story from a Mexican novelist who is “a luminous writer” and “a masterful spinner of the fantastic” (The Miami Herald). In Cleopatra Dismounts, Carmen Boullosa has written a remarkable imaginary life of one of history’s most legendary women. Dying in Marc Antony’s arms, Cleopatra bewails the end of her political career throughout ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Mediterranean. But is this weak woman the true Cleopatra? Through the intervention of Cleopatra’s scribe and informer Diomedes, Boullosa creates two deliriously wild other lives for the young monarch—a girl escaping the intrigues of royal society to disguise herself and take up residence with a band of pirates; and the young queen who is carried across the sea on the back of a magical bull, to live among the Amazons. Magical, multifaceted, and rippling with luminous imagination, Cleopatra Dismounts confirms Carmen Boullosa as an important international voice. “Wildly entertaining.” —The Washington Post “A highly appealing and poetic interpretation of the Egyptian queen’s doomed fate.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The Mexican fabulist Carmen Boullosa reinvents Cleopatra as a character for modern feminism to conjure with.” —The Boston Globe




The Adventure of Death


Book Description




Palinuro of Mexico


Book Description

Like those writers to whom he has been compared--Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, and Rabelais--del Paso draws upon myth, science, and world literature to expand his particular story to universal proportions. Telling the story of a medical medical student who's engaged in an incestuous affair with his cousin, the novel satirizes advertising, politics, pornography, and mythology, while at the same time celebrating the body with a thoroughness that only a student of medicine could manage.




The Beauty and the Sorrow


Book Description

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.




The Intentional Teacher


Book Description

Young children and teachers both have active roles in the learning processHow do preschoolers learn and develop? What are the best ways to support learning in the early years? This revised edition of The Intentional Teacher guides teachers to balance both child-guided and adult-guided learning experiences that build on children's interests and focus on what they need to learn to be successful in school and in life.This edition offers new chapters on science, social studies, and approaches to learning. Also included is updated, expanded information on social and emotional development, physical development and health, language and literacy, mathenatics, and the creative arts. In each chapter are many practical teaching strategies that are illustrated with classroom-based anecdotes.The Intentional Teacher encourages readers to- Reflect on their principles and practices- Broaden their thinking about appropriate early curriculum content and instructional methods- Discover specific ideas and teaching strategies for interacting with children in key subject areasIntentional teaching does not happen by chance. This book will help teachers apply their knowledge of children and of content to make thoughtful, intentional use of both child-guided and adult-guided experiences.




Heavens on Earth


Book Description

Three narrators from different historical eras are each engaged in preserving history in Carmen Boullosa's Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense and interact with each other over time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose.




Underground Time


Book Description

Everyday Mathilde takes the Metro, then the commuter train to the office of a large multi-national where she works in the marketing department. Every day, the same routine, the same trains. But something happened a while ago - she dared to voice a different opinion from her moody boss, Jacques. Bit by bit she finds herself frozen out of everything, with no work to do. Thibault is a paramedic. Every day he drives to the addresses he receives from his controller. The city spares him no grief: traffic jams, elusive parking spaces, delivery trucks blocking his route. He is well aware that he may be the only human being many of the people he visits will see for the entire day and is well acquainted with the symptomatic illnesses, the major disasters, the hustle and bustle and, of course, the immense, pervading loneliness of the city. Before one day in May, Mathilde and Thibault had never met. They were just two anonymous figures in a crowd, pushed and shoved and pressured continuously by the loveless, urban world. Underground Time is a novel of quiet violence - the violence of office-bullying, the violence of the brutality of the city - in which our two characters move towards an inevitable meeting. 'Two solitary existences cross paths in this poignant chronicle, a new testimony to de Vigan's superb eloquence' Lire