The Gods, The Little Guys And The Police
by: Costantini, Humberto / Talbot, Toby (translator)

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 230 pages. Translated from Spanish by Toby Talbot. Unclipped dust jacket with small crease on front flap, rubbing. Otherwise, clean and tight copy. A small gem of a novel, THE GODS, THE LITTLE GUYS AND THE POLICE won the Premio Casa de las Americas, the most prestigious literary prize offered for Latin American fiction, when it was originally published in Mexico. In this funny yet mordant satire of political terrorism in Argentina in the mid-1970s, a paramilitary death squad places the members of a poetry circle under surveillance. They include a bank clerk, a businessman and a pretty schoolteacher, as well as a cripple, a blind man and a former police informer, people as innocuous and apolitical as their verse. But having been denounced by a jealous wife of one of their members and betrayed by the informer, they have fallen prey to the violence and repression of Buenos Aires.