Lisa Dillman

"Claudia seeks the attention of her melancholic mother, also named Claudia, who occupies her days reading gossip magazines and tending to the family's teeming collection of house plants in their Cali, Colombia, apartment. The mother is particularly obsessed with the deaths of famous women such as actor Natalie Wood, who died in 1981, and tells the narrator they took their own lives to escape from domineering men. The older Claudia married the narrator's...

"In Canción, Eduardo Halfon's eponymous wanderer is invited to a Lebanese writers' conference in Japan, where he reflects on his Jewish grandfather's multifaceted identity. To understand more about the cold, fateful day in January 1967 when his grandfather was abducted by Guatemalan guerillas, Halfon searches his childhood memories and, soon, chance encounters around the world lead to more clues about his grandfather's captors, including a butcher...

As noted Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí hides an extraordinary relic in his complex masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia church, he is pursued by the leader of a malevolent secret society that remains a threat a century later.

Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings. Kafka did that. Bruno Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the terrifying Such Small Hands."Edmund WhiteLife changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to...

"Gonzalo Gil is a lawyer stuck in a disaffected life, in a failed career, trying to dodge the constant manipulation of his powerful father. This monotonous existence is shaken up when he learns, after years without news of his estranged sister, Laura, that she has committed suicide in dramatic circumstances. Her death pushes the fragile balance of Gonzalo's life as both a father and husband to the limit"--

"Eduardo Quintana is a broken man. The tragedy that cost him the lives of his family is a wound he daily tears open afresh. The once-renowned painter wallows in grief, subsisting on alcohol and drugs, eking out a living with whatever painting commissionshe can get. But when he is approached by a mysterious woman who wants him to paint a portrait of the man who killed her son, he soon becomes entangled in a web of deceit in which no one, and nothing,...

"The Mexico we hear of in the news-the drug cartels, migration and senseless violence-is rich soil for Herrera's moving stories of people who live in this reality but also live in the timeless realm of myth, epic and fairy tale, such as the singer Lobo in Kingdom Cons who loves the drug lord's own daughter, Makina who crosses borders to find her brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World, and the Redeemer, a hard-boiled hero looking to broker...