fiction mexico

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a price-clipped dust with mild tanning. Decorative endpapers, clean interior. Stated first edition. The book tells the story of flower now known as the poinsettia, which has its basis in Mexican legend. Woodcuts by Tom Lea. Inscription opposite title page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 319 pages. SIGNED BY THOMAS on the title page. Minor Jackson is broke when he meets Ploscaru, a dwarf, who tells Jackson that Kurt Oppenheimer's relatives would pay highly to have him found. What Ploscaru doesn't tell Jackson is that Oppenheimer is a professional killer who is being sought by the British, the Americans, and the Russians. Set in 1946, this intricately woven espionage thriller traverses four major settings beginning with Beverly Hills, California and continuing with Mexico, Germany and Washington, D.C. Clean copy.

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.

Softcover. London, Bloomsbury, 1st UK, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, illustrated card wrappers. What better place to hide a collection of priceless jewels than among the glitter and ostrich feathers of Rio's Carnival parade? The film-director narrator suddenly finds himself the custodian of such a valuable horde after the nocturnal visit of a young dancer who is soon found murdered. First published in 1988, the novel was a bestseller in Fonseca's home country of Brazil, as well as in Italy and Mexico. The English edition I read was published in 1997 in Britain, translated by Clifford Sanders.

Hardcover. NY, The Crime Club/ Doubleday, Doran & Co.,, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover, black cloth covers stamped in red. Dust jacket cover panel tipped onto inside front cover with flap copy opposite on front fly leaf. Attractively done. A Hildegarde Withers mystery. Classic crime tale from the 1930s set south of the border in old Mexico. 293 pages.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Translated by William I. Neuman. Novel set in 1922 in post-revolutionary Mexico, described as "a blending of roman noir with magic realism, a cross between Raymond Chandler and Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

Softcover. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, Reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 170 pages. Minor wear to covers, else a very neat copy.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Z. Walck, 1st, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth with black lettering, 125 pages, b&w illustrations by Harper Johnson. Children's story of a boy and his horse, living on a New Mexico ranch. When the Spanish cavalry needs horses for fighting the Indians, the horse is comandeered, and later captured by a Comanche warrior. Covers with light soil, clean internally, no markings.