A very beautiful collection of the best traditional "fazendas" depicting the wealthy lifestyles of that period. A great resource for portuguese colonial furniture with Brazilian hardwoods - a great combination !

This novel is amazing- a deeply disturbing often sadist romp into the netherworld of post-Peronist Argentina where a derranged minister of Juan Peron's second wife (not Evita) runs the show and choke-holds the Argentinian people with his "powers" and his psychosis. Very trippy- fun, in a sick, sick way. Expert craftsmanship and exciting narrative voice. Buy it and read it right away- then pass it on to a friend who can handle it.

With this book, I did what I haven't done with any other book before. I read the first story (The Third Resignation) immediately followed by the last story (The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother). The stories are arranged in chronological order and I could see the effect of time on the writer immediately. It was a journey from the completely inscrutable to absolute magic. I don't mean to say that the earlier stories are in any way inferior to the later ones. They take a little getting used to.

True to the Marquez trademark, almost all these stories have one or more magical women--sometimes she's a mute girl, sometimes she's the the quintessential opportunist, sometimes a helpless mother. Sometimes she's at the forefront of the plot, deciding the course of the story. Sometimes she merges with the background, letting things take their own course. Whatever her role, she has this uncanny ability to attract. Marquez is a painter who uses words instead of colors. If the translated pieces evoke such vivid imagery, I wonder what the originals would do. Wish I knew Spanish.

To the reader who is not used to the trademark "inscrutable" Marquez writing, I suggest that he/she read this book back to front. The initiated will enjoy either way, as long as it's cover to cover.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most incredible writers I have ever encountered. He is a profound storyteller. In fact, his work is like a beautiful Magritte painting filled with surreal images. I marvel at the translator. I can't imagine translating "Eyes of a Blue Dog." How on earth was he able to translate such a complicated story? It's incredible! The other stories are amazing as well. My favorites are "Big Mama's Funeral" and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." Each story has a special dose of magical realism. I look forward to reading other books from this author. I highly recommend this book.

Marquez is amazing. I've read other writings of his before, including the "One Hundred Years of Solitude," but these stories totally stunned me. Marquez paints a colorful and magical world around you. His stories flow like a river, you go with the flow unable to stop till you get to the end, and at the end he leaves you thirsty for more.

Marquez is an artist, and his stories are colorful, screamingly colorful pieces of art...

I have read "Hopscotch" three times in a span of 30 years. Each time I read it I found new meanings and more layers. It helps that my first language is Spanish. Translations usually take some details that embelish the original "Rayuela" (Hopscotch). Still, I have read it in the English version, and is a masterpiece. The world of Cortazar is magic and if you can enter it, may be you'll never find the way out...

"Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar is a novel I read with pleasure and great interest. The plot line of this book is not direct. It is well written novel with a very distinguished style. A parallel could be drawn with classic masterpiece "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway. The main hero Horacio Oliveira is quite intelligent. His life style, his friends with long metaphysical discussions in the night Paris, his relationship with girlfriends- all of this attracted my attention, sympathy and understanding. It is really doesn't matter what personages of this novel do, but rather interesting how they think and what their internal world looks like. Julio Cortazar, through the well-written conversations, opens insight world of his heroes, their interests, and their view on life. Here, I could find some similarities between Hemingway and Cortazar. The difference, however, is in the described generations. The generation Cortazar talks about in his work are more close and understandable to me than generation shown in the Hemingway's novel. Self-analysis, or self-reflection of the main heroes in the "Hopscotch" is very similar to those of which I and my friends used to have. In my opinion, the novel "Hopscotch" is so attractive to many other people and me because Cortazar created metaphysical world of intellectual fantasies. I could not resist temptation to mention another novel placed on the same bookshelf with "The Sun Also Rises" and "Hopscotch" - the novel "Gantenbein" by Max Frisch.

The man writes with unsurpassed artistry. Cortazar's unique structure in this amazing book takes an interesting second place to his rich observations and descriptions of the experience of "living through art" that this book bestows upon its reader. To some this may sound misguided, but the overall effect of this work hits me much on the same level as that of Bukowski or Salinger, the voice being so passionately captivating, but is perhaps more refined, like a well engineered missile. Only the greatest works of fiction are as vividly poetic as Hopscotch. It is an awesome book and a tapestry of the highest quality. I would recommend it to anyone, no matter what you like to read...

Well I always thought that the critics of Machado de Assis were exaggerating his capability, mainly because the critics usually point that he focus more on the psychological aspects of the characters rather than the story itself. That is absolute not true, even in the Realism phase of Machado. This book is the history of a common insignificant person living in the XIX century in Brazil. What is interesting about this book are the reflections that the author do that are sometimes even funny. He criticizes the idea of understading the social and individual behavior from a mechanicist point of view and exposes the culture distorted by the capitalism and politics exposing the ordinary life of an ordinary man. Corruption, frustrated love, cheats: this is what this book is all about.

"The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" is a landmark of 19th century Brazilian fiction. The original Portuguese version by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been rendered into an engaging English by translator Gregory Rabassa.

The book's hero, Bras Cubas, is a sort of lovable loser who narrates his own life from beyond the grave. The book is divided up into 160 short chapters, some less than a page long. As the story unfolds we meet a colorful cast of characters: Bras Cubas himself, his beloved Virgilia, the slave Prudencio, the strange philosopher Quincas Borba, and many more.

Throughout the novel, Machado de Assis (through his fictional narrator) continually plays games with the conventions of fiction and autobiography. Whether he is instructing the reader to insert Chapter CXXX "between the first and second sentences of Chapter CXXIX" or critiquing his own writing style, Cubas/Machado de Assis is full of surprises that make this novel a literary house of mirrors.

And throughout the novel the reader encounters passages of poetic depth and psychological insight. Despite being more than 100 years old, this book has an amazingly modern feel to it. This is a major work in the great tradition of South American fiction.

Although most people identify Brazilian literature with the vivid regionalism of Jorge Amado or (more recently) the mystical blabber of Paulo Coelho, Brazilian critics have long hailed Machado de Assis as the country's greatest writer and with good reason. This book is vivid proof of Machado's genius: deeply perceptive of human nature as in much of his work, but also radically innovative in style, displaying many traces of modernism some 30 - 40 years ahead of time. How else to characterize the chapter on the "Ancient Dialogue between Adam and Eve" (LV), written solely with punctuation? Or the one-sentence "useless" chapter (CXXXVI): "Unless I'm very much mistaken, I've just written an utterly useless chapter." The style is not without substance. Machado's trenchant insights on human nature and unabashed social criticism are brilliantly displayed in this work.

Machado's own view of the book was that it was too serious and deep for the frivolous and too playful and radical for the erudite readers of the time, and concluded in his usual pessimism that it would have "perhaps five" readers. Since the book continues to accumulate "fives and fives" of readers, perhaps humankind, like the flawed Brás Cubas, is also a "small winner" after all.

Factoid about the chapter size: As other reviewers noted, the book has numerous short chapters. One chief reason for this was that Machado was afflicted by epileptic attacks and could not write for extended periods.

It is a wonderful journey where the author takes you back and forward in a smooth way through the live in Macondo the little town in the middle of nowhere.It may takes you a while to understad I read the book 3 times the first time I had it and so far I read it 8 times in my lifetime and it never stops to excite me.You want to forget your problems, travel to Macondo and learn about making gold and many other things! discover another world.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, the one novel he was born to write. Having said that, don't fool yourself by thinking that "One hundred Years of Solitude" is an easy read, because it is not! At least it is not an easy read to begin with, but hang in there - it is evidently worth the struggle! Make sure that you get an edition that has a family tree of the Buendía family in front of the book. Ear-dog that page, as you will use it repeatedly while working your way through this book. I mean, how many Josés, Aurelianos, or Remedios can you possibly remember and/or distinguish between?

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the story of the small village 'Macondo' hidden the jungle of Colombia. José Arcadio Buendía was the founder of this village, and it is the story of him and his family that keeps you spellbound through the 400+ pages. After finishing this book you will understand why Garcia Marques won the Nobel Prize. This is one of my all time favorite books. I only wish I read Spanish so well that I could read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in its original language.

I couldn't recommend it more highly. A great read!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is an enchanting and engaging read that chronicles the lives of the Buendia family. The lively and eccentric characters like Jose Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch of the family, whose pursuits include getting a daguerreotype of God will make you laugh and make you think. Humorous incidents abound, including a supposed insomnia plague which causes the town to label every item in their house including the cow. Marquez's style is intoxicating and with every word he challenges the limits of reality and unearths the magical aspects of daily life. When Marquez describes carpets laden down with passengers flying through the air you simply accept an obviously impossible act as truth. The novel's length is somewhat daunting but very accessible. I would recommend this novel for anyone who enjoys fantasy or has an interest in Latin American culture. As the title suggests each character has his/her own private battle regarding the amount of solitude which is necessary and beneficial and amount that is overwhelming and debilitating. Sometimes the character's actions, like Rebecca eating earth and whitewash, seem absurd but Marquez always keeps in mind the nature of humanity and its varying inclinations. This novel won both the Nobel Prize and my admiration.

This book builds to less then nothing (for nothing can sometimes actually be exciting). Cortazar is impressive, no doubt, but his stuff is at its core is just gimmicks and mindtricks. No real substance. He writes like someone merely trying to impress his peers in his creative writing class, and maybe get laid by that cute girl in the corner. To say he influenced writers like Marquez elevates him too much. Marquez likely saw what Cortazar lacked and built on it from there. Fun to read like it's fun watching a magician, but that's as far as it goes.

62: A Model Kit is ably translated from Spanish for an English reading audience by Gregory Rebassa and is a novel of fantasy, comedy, cities, snatches of conversations, brief meetings, characters whose lives begin at any moment and end in intense, brilliant encounters with others on a train, poignant love making, and even restaurant dining. The construction is free and open, devoid of the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order and take the reader on a daring and exciting new approach to life itself. 62: A Model Kit written so deftly and daringly by the late Julio Cortazar (1914-1984) is enthusiastically recommended reading for anyone with an interest in pushing the literary envelope as exemplified by the format of the novel.

To summarize this book would be to discredit it. It must be read by anyone who is interested in the quirks and subtleties that haunt human action. It is not intended as a book of horror, or a humorous book for that matter, but this is what one will find in the most honest and purest sense of the words. The author would be scandalized by the application of such sentimental terms, but as I am not Mr. Cortazar, I am afraid this is the best I can do.

I don't know if it was a bad week for concentration, but I have to admit I had a difficult time with "Leaf Storm," the first and longest (130 pages) of the "short" stories in this collection by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Told through the voices of three characters of a small town, the story revolves around a stranger who appears the same time as the notorious "leaf storm," becomes the town doctor, has a mental breakdown, and dies a friendless recluse, both loathed and feared by the townsfolk.

The story is dreamlike and lush, yet the translator, Gregory Rabassa, did a poor job of marking changes between narrators. The story is told all in first person, but the person speaking changes frequently, sometimes even from paragraph to paragraph. So, with no stylistic break or transition, this made for a very difficult read.

Once past "Leaf Storm," however, I found myself enraptured by the tales in the six other short stories in the collection. Two of the stories are actually subtitled "A Tale For Children," and are the ones I found most compelling.

In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," (originally published in Playboy) we see a town transformed when the body of a stranger washes up on the shore. And "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" tells of an angel kept captive as an oddity by a curious family who rescues him after a flood. These two stories remind me a lot of the "children's" stories of Hans Christian Andersson ("The Little Match Girl") and Oscar Wilde ("The Selfish Giant").

I would recommend finding Leaf Storm and Other Stories translated by someone other than Gregory Rabassa, if you can, to see if you'll get a clearer version of the title story. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has created some fabulous mythological characters that will stay with you long after you finish this collection.

This wonderful book by GABO was the first one he wrote. So, it is very subject to the rules of writing. Later on the author would change completely to get the highest level at EL OTOñO DEL PATRIARCA, passing by "ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE". The story is a killing that the author did not witness but that everybody in Colombia knew, and nobody talked about. Maybe because of fear for their own safety. GABO's grandfather told him the story when he was less than 6 years old. As a grown up he investigated by himself. The story happens at the Banana Plantation in Northern Colombia, where the explotator owned the life of their workers because they did no follow the law. American gringos bought the final product. A revolution wanted to start but was stopped by the worst masacre ever in that area. I read this book the first time when it was published by chapters in the local newspaper. Then we knew that this man was going to be the greatest of all times, the Mohamad Ali of the Spanish literature in the 20th century. This book is a must for everybody interested in GABO's work. Jose

"Quincas Borba" is one of a series of fine novels by Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. The author, who died in 1908, is one of the major figures of 19th century South American literature. "Quincas Borba" is a sort of companion volume to another of the author's novels, "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." While "Quincas Borba" does not, in my opinion, attain the level of literary inventiveness of its companion novel, it is still a fascinating, and ultimately moving, piece of fiction. It has been translated into a smooth English by Gregory Rabassa.

"Quincas Borba" tells the story of Rubiao, who inherits a fortune, as well as a pet dog, from the eccentric philosopher Quincas Borba. Curiously, the dog is also named Quincas Borba. The novel follows Rubiao as he attempts to find love and fulfillment in 19th century Brazil.

The novel contains many ironic comments on the craft of writing itself, and examines the political, sexual, and economic complexities of Rubiao's world. The author's writing is peppered with intriguing cultural allusions: Poe, Shakespeare's "Othello," Homer, Mozart, Kant, Dante's "Inferno," and more.

"Quincas Borba" is an effective mix of comedy and tragedy. Machado de Assis writes with both insight into and compassion for the human condition. Those interested in 19th century literature, Latin American studies, or the development of the novel should definitely read this book.

This is one of the best books I've ever read! The story of the ascencion and fall of a man, his sanity and madness, make us think about our human condition. Machado de Assis is undobted the best Brazilian writer.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is certainly a great writer and his Nobel Prize is no fluke. However, this is a collection of his early stories with most dating back to the late 1940's and early 1950's. It is interesting to see the early focus on the out-of-body, after-life and other-worldly experiences that lead the author toward the eventual "magic realism". That doesn't mean that they're good stories to read. In fact, I found most stories (other than the title story) to be rather tedious reading even as short as most of them were. "Innocent Erendira" is a good example of the author's polished style and stands as a contrast to the other works. Some sort of editing mishap has the book lead with "Innocent Erendira" rather than closing with it. Thus we see the best in the beginning and watch the rest go down hill rather than build up to the climax (as should have been done). I have often made it a point to read all of a favorite author's works and Garcia Marquez is certainly a favorite of mine. However, I have learned that even greatness has its' measure of mediocrity. This book is a reminder of that.

Start off with "100 Years of Solitude", and then enjoy these short stories, they will take you back to a magical time that used to be. Marquez weaves his magic best in long, heady volumes, but these stories are not-to-be-missed for any fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I read this book as well as watched the movie for my Spanish 495 class at school and thought that it was one of the more interesting of the books that we read, among el reino de este mundo, and pedro páramo. It had so much simbolism and meaning to it. I recommend it for fun, as well as for a course. It's fairly short, but with a lot of meaning behind it.