Lisa Dillman

"Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of...

"In Colombia’s brutal jungle, childless Damaris develops an intense and ultimately doomed relationship with an orphaned puppy. Colombia’s Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. In this constant struggle, nothing is taken for granted. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up', as her uncle puts it, she is...

"In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the kingdom to its core"--Page 4 of cover. Part surreal fable and part crime romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power. -- from Amazon.

"San Cristobal was an unremarkable city--small, newly prosperous, contained by rain forest and river. But then the children arrived. No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city's own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse,...

Cat sitter, insomniac, former schoolteacher. Ania worries she is a "stand-in occupant," a substitute in her own life. When she receives a request from her father to visit her dying uncle Agustín in Argentina, she makes the long journey across the Andes from Chile to Campana, where her family immigrated from Italy. Her trip, one she used to make every summer with her father, will be an escape from the present and a journey to the borders of memory....

In Monastery, the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon's critically-acclaimed The Polish Boxer returns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, and border towns to a private jazz concert in New York's Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, and Israel, where he escapes from his sister's Orthodox Jewish wedding into an erotic adventure with the enigmatic Tamara.

"In Canción, Eduardo Halfon's eponymous wanderer is invited to a Lebanese writers' conference in Japan, where he reflects on his Jewish grandfather's multifaceted identity. To understand more about the cold, fateful day in January 1967 when his grandfather was abducted by Guatemalan guerillas, Halfon searches his childhood memories and, soon, chance encounters around the world lead to more clues about his grandfather's captors, including a butcher...

A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by "one of Mexico's finest novelists". The characters that populate Yuri Herrera's surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, this collection features fantastical stories in which monsters and...