January 2002

6 x 9 in., 192 pp.
ISBN 0-292-72839-5
$40.00, hardcover

Killer Books
Writing, Violence, and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative
By Aníbal González

"Aníbal González's book is a rich, exquisitely erudite, highly original, brilliantly argued essay about profound ethical issues in the history of writing literature in Spanish America.... It is the work of a consummate and recognized critic at the height of his powers."
—César A. Salgado, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin

Writing and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day.

In this masterful study, Aníbal González traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own relation to writing. Using an approach that owes much to the recent "turn to ethics" in deconstruction and to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, he examines selected short stories and novels by major Spanish American authors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel Zeno Gandía, Teresa de la Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. He shows how these authors frequently display an attitude he calls "graphophobia," an intense awareness of the potential dangers of the written word.

June 2001

6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in., 384 pp., 22 photos, 2 maps
ISBN 0-292-73146-9
$50.00, hardcover
ISBN 0-292-73147-7
$24.95, paperback

ReMembering Cuba
Legacy of a Diaspora
By Andrea O'Reilly Herrera

"To date, no [other] book representing such a wide and extensive sampling of views and experiences of the Cuban Diaspora exists." —Isabel Alvarez Borland, author of Cuban-American Narratives of Exile: From Person to Persona

Longing for their lost homeland unites Cuban exiles and their children, many of whom have never seen the Island. Yet as decades pass and the hope of "next year in Cuba" fades, the Cuban American community has had to forge new understandings of where "home" is and what it means to be "Cuban," "American," and/or "Cuban American." The testimonies gathered in this book offer over one hundred perspectives on the Cuban diaspora and on what it means to be Cuban in exile. Through narratives, interviews, creative writings, letters, journal entries, recipes, photographs, and paintings, Cubans from various waves of the migration and their descendants piece together a complex mosaic of the exile experience and diasporic identity.

In her introduction, Andrea O'Reilly Herrera describes how she conceived the project and chose the contributors, including both unknown and established artists and writers such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Sylvia Curbelo, Pablo Medina, Lourdes Gil, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Heberto Padilla, and José Kozer. The contributors' diverse and sometimes conflicting voices offer a more inclusive and complex understanding of Cuban American identity and the various Cuban "presences" residing throughout the United States. Likewise, they overthrow a perceived "hierarchy of suffering" among Cuban Americans, which purports to dictate who can and cannot speak authentically about exile and loss, as well as what form their expression can take

2000

6 x 9 in., 304 pp.
ISBN 0-292-72511-6
$35.00, hardcover
ISBN 0-292-72512-4
$16.95, paperback

The authoritative handbook for writers, editors, translators, students, and scholars

The Writer's Reference Guide to Spanish
By David William Foster, Daniel Altamiranda, and Carmen de Urioste

"The importance of this book . . . is indisputable. . . . Its usefulness will apply to an audience far beyond students of Spanish; it will, in fact, become a companion text, like the MLA Style Manual, to a larger audience of users running the gamut from bilingual writers, i.e., fiction writers and journalists, to editors who are unsure about proper usage."
—Dick Gerdes, Professor and Chair of Modern and Classical Languages, George Mason University

Writers and editors of Spanish have long needed an authoritative guide to written language usage, similar to The MLA Style Manual and The Chicago Manual of Style. And here it is! This reference guide provides comprehensive information on how the Spanish language is copyedited for publication.

The book covers these major areas:

• Language basics: capitalization, word division, spelling, and punctuation.
• Language conventions: abbreviations, professional and personal titles, names of organizations, and nationalities.
• Bibliographic format, particularly how Spanish differs from English.
• Spanish language forms of classical authors' names.
• Literary and grammatical terminology.
• Linguistic terminology.
• Biblical names and allusions.
• A dictionary of grammatical doubts, including usage, grammatical constructions of particular words and phrases, verbal irregularities, and gender variations.