El hobbit

‘Somewhere in the cosmos there are happier places,’ muses Martin Vrána, the hero of Jan Balabán’s novel Where was the Angel Going?. ‘People are transported to the planet Earth for punishment. Part of the punishment is their ignorance of the fact. We’ve forgotten that we’ve forgotten.’ Yet, as this very reflection implies, in Martin’s case, part of his ‘punishment’ is his ever-present memory of an Eden from which he had been expelled. The prototypical outsider, a member of a minority community within a minority community (a Protestant in the overwhelmingly agnostic Czech...

Published here for the first time in a modern edition, Charlotte Smith’s third novel is both rivetingly plotted and unique for its time in its powerful depiction of a gifted Romantic woman poet. The novel’s heroine, Celestina, abandoned as a child in a French convent, becomes an independent, witty, and accomplished elegiac poet who, in a reversal of the usual pattern of the courtship novel, acts as a mentor to several men in her life. Written at the beginning of the French Revolution, Smith’s novel depicts characters challenging both corrupt authority and conventional morality,...

Lo último de Jeffrey Eugenides: una lúcida mirada sobre los anhelos y las contradicciones humanas. Un joven viaja por el mundo en busca de iluminación y se enfrenta a todo tipo de experiencias, no siempre agradables; una estudiante de origen indio seduce a un profesor buscando una salida desesperada a la situación de su familia; un poeta fracasado que ha encontrado trabajo en la editorial de un antiguo pornógrafo acaba dejándose arrastrar por la tentación del dinero y la América del pelotazo; un sexólogo tiene un perturbador encuentro sexual en una selva remota; un matrimonio que...

Esta pequeña multitud de ensayos gira en torno a los secretos, traiciones, glorias y secretos del cuerpo humano pero también sobre lo que, en opinión de Mauricio Ortiz, parece emanar de él: alma, memoria, recuerdos, fantasmas, o el inasible sentido de la vida. La presente es una segunda edición revisada, "con las fuerzas restauradas" y epilogada por el autor.