Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on transforming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile's most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jeronimo's deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo's wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful--once upon a time... Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity.

Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso's pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author's birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.

All of a sudden, Blanca Arias has it all. The daughter of middling Nicaraguan diplomats posted to Madrid, she marries, at the age of 19, the equally young and passionate Marquess of Loria, her darling Paquito, heir to one of the largest fortunes (and most august titles) in Spain. Paquito, as if on cue, dies of diphtheria, leaving his young widowed Marquise alone, free, and inconceivably rich.

Donoso's luxurious and disturbing work details the sexual awakening of the Marquise of Loria as her white-gloved chauffeur shuttles her from tryst to tryst. But it's not all Patek Phillipes and pink champagne: Blanca's mother-in-law Casilda is scheming with her gang of sycophants to take back their fortune from this newly-minted Loria, and there's no low they won't sink to to get it. The mysterious presence of Luna, a Weimaraner pup who infiltrates Blanca's chambers and hypnotizes her with his lunar gaze, twists this glittering elegy to the literary erotica of 1920s Madrid into something more: a psychological thriller and a profound investigation into the surfaces that the fortunate gild and polish to hide the darkness that lies beneath.

As exuberant as it is explicit--and elegantly translated into English for the first time by Megan McDowell--The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria--shows the Boom-era master Donoso in a lighter mode, and the result is irresistible.

An enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City. --Francisco Goldman

Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of Mexican poetry. Uruguayan by birth, Mexican by destiny, the vagrant poetess serves as guardian, confidant, literary mentor, and occasional lover to a generation of Mexico City's mad young poets, a fixture in their heady bohemian swirl. On the infamous day in 1968 when the military invades the campus of the city's main university, Auxilio is in the women's bathroom of the department of literature and philosophy, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfias on the toilet. Trapped and alone, she hides there for twelve days, her life's story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Roberto Bolaño's Amulet is a haunting, spellbinding meditation on violence and exile, on memory and history--a requiem for a lost generation.

A taxidermied parrot, insulted by a stodgy uncle, comes violently alive and batters the poor fool to death with its beak. A terrible tyrant, Zar Palemón, presides over grotesque ritualized sex acts in his court--which is itself contained in a demonic gemstone the size of a fist. And deep in the Andes, in a hidden cave, an unremarkable house cat waits to trap its hapless victim with a Gorgon's gaze and engage him in a staring contest on which the fate of the cosmos just might depend.

Such are a few of the bizarre adventures found within Juan Emar's mind-bending collection of short stories, Ten. Allegory? Parody? Horror? Surrealism? Yes to all, and none of the above: where lesser writers mark their end-point, the unclassifiable Juan Emar jumps off, straight into the deep end. Life is far from still in Emar's world, where statues come alive, gaseous vampires stalk, and our hopes and fears materialize in a web of shocking interconnections unified by twisted logic and crystalline prose.

Now, Ten is available in English for the first time, deftly translated by Megan McDowell and with an introduction by César Aira, who writes: Emar has neither precedents nor equals; his echoes and affinities--Lautréamont, Macedonio Fernández, Gombrowicz--flow from his readers' own inclinations. Byzantine and vivid, intricate and bizarre, this quiver of shorts by Chile's most idiosyncratic mad genius of literature will leave readers astounded for decades to come.

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1945. Mistral has fascinated scholars, writers, and artists, who have tried to piece together the variegated layers of her persona and her emotionally outspoken verses, as Langston Hughes described them. Sundial House's centenary edition commemorates Mistral's debut anthology, Desolación (1922), edited by Federico de Onís at Columbia University. This bilingual edition, featuring 37 poems translated by Langston Hughes, breathes new life into the Mistral's first anthology and makes available in English an intimate portrait of an ardent observer of life. Desolación is an evocative collection of poems and haunting poetic prose that explore desire, grief, motherhood, childhood, nature, and spirituality with radical sensibility.

A near-future fable about love, life, and friendship in a world that's coming apart.

Chilco is the name of Pascale's home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness, wetness, the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighborhood, another raft of desperate refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet.

When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping from the crushing weight of centuries of colonial repression that have eroded indigenous memories, language, and culture, or are they merely stepping into a twisted, lush new version of it? From her first days in this place where she's supposed to feel safe and at home, Marina can't avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her--there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past.

In Chilco, Daniela Catrileo's baroque, tropical jeremiad, the wounds of capitalism and empire inflict themselves on the person and on the land, but linger most devastatingly in language and memory. Indigenous Mapudungun and Quechua words, history, and cosmology form the chorus to this tropical fever dream of life, love, death, and friendship.

Til She Go No More, Beatriz García Huidobro simultaneously maps the coordinates of the intimate story of a female teenager and the broader historical and socioeconomic reality of Chile in the early 70's. The story is narrated in the form of a monologue, through the eyes of a young female protagonist who resides in desolate town in the mountainous region where the landscape is bleak and barren, and men futilely toil in unproductive fields. The aridness of the land mirrors the hopeless and hapless lives of the characters whose dreams are futile and futures are compromised. Like silhouettes in sepia, the protagonist and others are sketched as characters that live out a wearisome, tenuous existence, shrouded in ambiguity, in a circular time that is based upon the repetition of daily chores and the changing of the seasons, marked by the events in the life cycle.

Con la idea de ayudar a niños abandonados en hospitales, una joven asistente social con notorias marcas en la cara, vuelve a la ciudad donde una vez ella misma fue rescatada de la muerte por maltrato.

Ambrosia visita a Eusebio y Marta, el médico y la enfermera que la defendieron de su madre agresora, quienes atienden ahora a un grupo de jóvenes quemados por una explosión de gas. Dos policías asedian el despertar de estos pacientes para averiguar de dónde proviene el cóctel de drogas de la fiesta que terminó en el accidente.

Al reconocer el miedo a la muerte en los ojos de uno de los quemados, apodado el 4x4, sin pensarlo, Ambrosia lo ayuda a escapar del hospital. La fuga tendrá consecuencias tanto para ella y su proyecto como para el doctor y la enfermera a quienes tanto estima.

Ambrosia y los hijos de la noche es una novela policial y psicológica que introduce una errática esperanza que busca sin saber cómo superar una realidad implacable que sólo una ayuda que lo arriesgue todo puede cambiar.

Motherhood is terrifying, thinks Laura, feeling small and helpless as she holds her newborn daughter.

Instead of joy, she feels fear, and then anger at her own late mother for her absence. The Cracks We Bear opens as a story about new motherhood. Soon, however, it reveals itself to be an exploration of memory and trauma as Laura starts to recall her childhood in Chile. Born in exile to staunchly communist parents, she returns to Chile with her mother after the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the fledgling democracy she grows up in, topics of capitalism and communism are ever present. Laura's reflections, born from personal experience, are interwoven with raw and honest memories of her family life. Borrowing elements from the Bildungsroman, and pulling from the Latin American short story tradition, Catalina Infante recounts Laura's past in vignettes. Piece by piece, the short chapters come together like a reconstructed vase, bearing its cracks.