Edith Grossman

"Widely acknowledged as the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote features two of the most famous characters ever created: Don Quixote de la Mancha, the tall, bewildered, and half-crazy knight, and Sancho Panza, his rotund and incorrigibly loyal squire. The unforgettable comic dynamic between these two legendary figures has served as the blue-print for countless novels written since Cervantes's time. An immediate success when first...

One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposés. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and...

October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with

...

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit—he has purchased hundreds of women—he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a

...

Amid the lush, coastal tropics of an eighteenth-century South American seaport, an unruly, copper-haired girl and a bookish priest are caught in chaste, ill-fated love affair. Sierva Maria, the only child of a decaying noble family, has been raised in the slave quarters of her father's mansion while her mother resides on a faraway plantation. On her twelfth birthday she is bitten by a rabid dog, and even as the wound heals she is made to endure therapies...

The fantasies of a frustrated husband. The protagonist is a Peruvian insurance executive whose second wife had an affair with his son. He threw her out and is reduced to sleeping with her in his imagination.

Havana, 1957. On the same day that the Mafia capo Umberto Anastasia is assassinated in a barber's chair in New York, a hippopotamus escapes from the Havana zoo and is shot and killed by its pursuers. Assigned to cover the zoo story, Joaquín Porrata, a young Cuban journalist, instead finds himself embroiled in the mysterious connections between the hippo's death and the mobster's when a secretive zookeeper whispers to him that he "knows too much."

...

"In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world--especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon--but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved...

Lima prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar becomes the investigator in a mysterious murder, discovering links to the terrorist group, the Shining Path, and mass graves that expose the destruction and corruption of Peruvian society during the Fujimori regime.