Americas

Sex as a Political Condition: A Border Novel is a raucous journey through political dangers that come in all shapes, cup sizes, and sexual identities-a trip into the wild, sometimes disgusting world of the Texas-Mexico border and all geographical and anatomical points south. Honoré del Castillo runs the family curio shop in the backwater border town of Escandón, Texas, and fears dying in front of his TV like some six-pack José in his barrio. Encouraged by his friend Trotsky, he becomes politically active-smuggling refugees, airlifting guns to Mexican revolutionaries, negotiating with radical Chicana lesbians-but the naked truths he faces are more often naked than true and constantly threaten to unman him. When a convoy loaded with humanitarian aid bound for Nicaragua pulls into Escandón, Honoré sees his chance, and his journey to becoming a true revolutionary hero begins, first on Escandón's international bridge and then on the highways of Mexico. But not until both the convoy and Honoré's mortality and manhood are threatened in Guatemala does he finally confront the complications of his love for his wife and daughter, his political principles, the stench of human fear, and ultimately what it means to be a principled man in a screwed-up world.

Pretty, twenty-year-old Mariposa has entered the U.S. from Honduras by way of Nuevo Laredo, without documentation. She now serves drinks and woos customers as a B-girl-sort of a dime-a-dance arrangement-in a shabby nightclub on the east side of Austin, Texas. Rough work, it's at least giving her a start in America. Between the norteño and cumbia songs the DJ plays, a smooth-talking Anglo out-of-towner who calls himself Bill shows up at the club one Saturday night to sit and casually chat with Mariposa. He smiles and sympathizes; his flattery leads her to reveal the secret pain she has kept hidden so long. But Mariposa has no way of knowing that he's being hunted by police throughout the Southwest. Even in Austin, far from the border, there are dangers more sinister than narcotraficantes or la migra. LaSalle's intense, haunting novel beckons readers into the shadowy lives of undocumented workers in the U.S. and the difficult choices they must face. Written as a single book-length sentence, Mariposa's Song is also a truly innovative achievement in the novel form itself, as it continually startles and satisfies with stylistic daring and sheer lyrical radiance.

Inventive, disconcerting, and hilarious, Daniel Grandbois's present-day fables call to mind Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories as readily as they do Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Rikki Ducornet's Butcher's Tales, and Woody Allen's most literary writings. Braced on the shoulders of the fabulists, fantasists, flash-fictionists, absurdists, surrealists, and satirists who came before him, Daniel Grandbois dredges up impossible meanings from the mineral and plant kingdoms, as well as the animal, and serves them to us as if they were nothing more fantastic than a plate of eggs and ham. Like Zen koans, these stories playfully short-circuit the brain to bypass normal thought and open the mind to undiscovered worlds of perception. As the human organism responds inexplicably to music, to particular combinations of notes of varying pitches and durations and the intervals of silence between them, so too it responds in profound yet ultimately incomprehensible ways to the twists and parries of Grandbois's mischievous prose.

With Dreaming of the Delta, Perla Suez joins the ranks of other prominent Argentine writers who have incorporated the horrors of the violent period of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Highly experimental, this novel is a tale of secrecy, betrayal, and violence that reflects on a personal scale the national struggle for power and control at the height of the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. And though violence takes center stage, it is played out in a private drama that unfolds in a mansion on the shores of the Paraná River in the province of Entre Ríos. Like the timeless river itself, Suez's words ebb and flow across the pages, leaving in their wake volatile voids that suggest to the reader that what is not disclosed is as powerful as what is revealed. With a skeletal prose that blurs the line between novel, theater, and film, Suez condenses decades of cruelty and longing into a few brief hours.

When Sybille arrives in Paris from Guadeloupe with her infant son, she encounters the extravagant and marvelous Lila. Sybille is young and black with her life still ahead of her; an ex-actress, Lila is white and seventy years old. Despite their differences, the women become inseparable. Haunted by memories, Lila confides in Sybille and, among other things, relates the endless cycle of lovers in her life. Her most cherished memories are of Henry, a black man from the British Caribbean whom she met during the Liberation Day celebrations in Paris. Gradually, Sybille and Lila discover that the West Indies and the charm of Guadeloupe create a deep and common bond between them. The narrative leaps from one side of the Atlantic to the other, playing black against white, past against present, rural Caribbean culture against the urban life of Paris and New York. Sybille's memories of her own tragic childhood form a counterpoint to tales of Henry growing up on the island of St. John. The stories contain mysterious and magical elements revolving around one central theme: how fate works to draw lovers apart. Despite repeated defeats, love still survives. In tales and in legends, mocking all obstacles, it circumvents the game of destiny and the tragic vanity of mankind.

Originally published in Spanish in 2000 and first appearing in English in 2004, The Letters that Never Came is an autobiographical novel in three parts that reflects Rosencof's life growing up in 1930s Uruguay as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and, later, his twelve-year imprisonment during the military dictatorship his country suffered. Part I is a rich evocation of life in Montevideo in the mid-1930s as seen through the eyes of young Moishe. Every day, Moishe's father waits for the postman, hoping for news of his family, who are prisoners of the Nazis. Interspersed among Moishe's reminiscences are the letters those relatives might have written-but never came. In Part II, Moishe is imprisoned in the dungeons of the military junta that governed Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s. Tortured and starving, he takes refuge in the world of his imagination, composing another letter that never came-a letter to his father that embodies his own quest for identity. Part III is largely a meditation on the redemptive power of the word, real and imagined. This poignant, humane work, as Uruguayan and Jewish as it is universal, links the cruelty of the Holocaust to that of the Uruguayan military and the resistance of Hitler's victims to his own.