Download or read book Times Gone By written by Vicente Pérez Rosales and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These memoirs trace the wild and adventurous life of Pérez Rosales from his childhood up to the 1860s. During that approximately half-century he saw and did more than a dozen ordinary men. At age eleven in Argentina he witnessed the executions of Luis and Juan Jose Carrera. From there, his activities and adventures took him on several journeys on sailing vessels around Cape Horn; to Paris, where he witnessed the July revolution of 1830; to various commercial endeavors including a distillery, the practice of medicine, and cattle smuggling; into service as an advisor to an Argentine warlord; as a miner for precious metals in the north of Chile; as participant in the California Gold Rush in 1849; as director of the government's project for German immigration and settlement in the wild south of Chile; and also as Chilean consul and immigration agent in Hamburg. Around the world, Rosales lived through many of his era's watershed moments. His exciting memoirs offer a chance to relive the rush and chaos of these times--from a much safer vantage.

Download or read book Behind the Curtains written by Carmen Martín Gaite and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Christ Versus Arizona written by Camilo José Cela and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the shootout at the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and the McLaurys. Set against a backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, the story is a bravura performance by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winning author. A monologue by the naive, unreliable, and uneducated Wendell L. Espana, the book weaves together hundreds of characters and a torrent of interconnected anecdotes, some true, some fabricated. Wendell s story is a document of the vast array of ills that welcomed the dawning of the twentieth century, ills that continue to shape our world in the new millennium."

Download or read book Journey to the Alcarria written by Camilo José Cela and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, Camilo José Cela has long been recognized as one of the preeminent Spanish writers of the twentieth century. Journey to the Alcarria is the best known of his vagabundajes, Cela's term for his books of travels, sketchbooks of regions or provinces. The Alcarria is a territory in New Castile, northeast of Madrid, surrounding most of the Guadalajara province. The region is high, rocky, and dry, and is famous for its honey. Cela himself is "the traveler," an urban intellectual wandering from village to village, through farms and along country roads, in search of the Spanish character. Cela relishes his encounters with the simple, honest people of the Spanish countryside--the blushing maid in the tavern, the small-town shopkeeper with airs of grandeur lonely for companionship, the old peasant with his donkey who freely shares his bread and blanket with the stranger. These vignettes are narrated in a fresh, clear prose that is wonderfully evocative. As the New York Times wrote, Cela is "an outspoken observer of human life who built his reputation on portraying what he observed in a direct colloquial style."

Download or read book In Praise of the Stepmother written by Mario Vargas Llosa and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-12-20 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With meticulous observation and the seductive skill of a great storyteller, Vargas Llosa lures the reader into the shadow of perversion that, little by little, darkens the extraordinary happiness and harmony of his characters. The mysterious nature of happiness and above all, the corrupting power of innocence are the themes that underlie these pages, and the author has perfectly met the demands of the erotic novel, never dimming for an instant the fine poetic polish of his writing.