Books published by Charco Press

¿Cómo mantener una amistad intacta cuando el Alzheimer se va llevando consigo las bases del lenguaje, la memoria y las experiencias compartidas?How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?

In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy's Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too-M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend. This loss holds Molloy's sense of herself too-the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend's memory does. But the writer remains: 'I'm not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there's nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.'

A mil doscientas millas de tierra firme, resistencia raizal, turistas descuidados, y una historia embarrada sobre la conquista convergen para Victoria, quien vuelve a su hogar desde la Ciudad de México lista para descifrarse a sí misma y al lugar de donde viene.Two hundred miles from mainland Colombia, grassroots resistance, sloppy tourists, and a muddy history of conquest converge for Victoria, home from Mexico City and ready to understand herself and the place she came from.

_Five hundred miles from mainland Colombia, grassroots resistance, sloppy vacationers, and a muddy history of conquest converge for Veronica, returning after living in Mexico City, ready to understand herself and the place she came from. _San Andres rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before. For Victoria - whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin colour, her years far away - the sunburnt tourists, sewage blooms, sudden storms, and 'thinking rundowns' where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andres.

Collection, colonialism, translation, and the ephemera that shapes the stories we tell about ourselves.

Never Did the Fire unfolds in the humdrum of everyday working class existence, making the afterlife of an agitator that of anyone living next door. For one old couple, brought together years ago in an underground cell, the revolution has ended in a small apartment, a grinding job caring for the bodies of the unwell well-to-do, and all the aches and pains that go with a long life and a long marriage. Untethered from the political action that defined them, and mourning the loss of their child, their bonds dissolve, but the consequences of their former life, and their dependence on each other, won't let them go.A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit is at the height of her powers in this novel of breakdowns. Never Did the Fire evokes the charged air of Chile's violent past, and the burdens it carries into the present-day, when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation.

Un juego intertextual que atraviesa la Ciudad de México con el espíritu de Juan Rulfo y Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.

An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.

In Catching Fire, the translation of Diamela Eltit's Never Did the Fire unfolds in real time as a conversation between works of art, illuminating both in the process. The problems and pleasures of conveying literature into another language-what happens when you meet a pun? a double entendre?-are met by translator Daniel Hahn's humor, deftness, and deep appreciation for what sets Eltit's work apart, and his evolving understanding of what this particular novel is trying to do.

The mysteries of kinship (families born into and families made) take disconcerting and familiar shapes in these refreshingly frank short stories. A family is haunted by a beast that splatters fruit against its walls every night, another undergoes a near-collision with a bus on the way home from the beach. Mothers are cold, fathers are absent-we know these moments in the abstract, but Adaui makes each as uncanny as our own lives: close but not yet understood.

The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood.Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results."e;Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment."e; Kali Fajardo-Anstine

The third and final installment of Ariana Harwicz's "e;Involuntary Trilogy"e; finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother's madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior. Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality. Savage, and savagely funny, she leaves us singed, if not scorched.

Two young men, Pajaro Tamai and Marciano Miranda, are dying in a deserted amusement park. The story begins almost at its end, just after the two main characters have faced off in a knife fight: the culmination of a rivalry that has pitted them against one another since childhood. The present in Brickmakers is a state of impending death, at moments marked by dream-like visions: Marciano is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered when he was a teenager, a father he had sworn to avenge, in a promise he could not keep. Pajaro is also visited, in a recurring nightmare, by his abusive father who disappeared years earlier.Narrated with fury and passion, reminiscent of William Faulkner or Katherine Anne Porter, Brickmakers is a rural tragedy in the great American tradition, a story of love, honour and violence where everything is at stake. Reprising the powerful imagery and the filmic landscape of The Wind That Lays Waste, and the threatening atmosphere of Dead Girls, Brickmakers is yet another proof of Almada's extraordinary talent.

"e;a story's existence, even if not well defined or well assigned, even if only in its formative stage, just barely latent, emits vague but urgent emanations."e;Byobu's every interaction trembles with possibility and faint menace. A crack in the walls of his house, marring it forever, means he must burn it down. A stoplight asks what the value of obedience is, what hopefulness it contains, and what insensible anarchy it defies. In brief episodes, aphorisms, and moments of spiritual turbulence and gentle scrutiny, reside a wealth of habits, worries, curiosities, pleasures, peculiarities, and efforts to understand.Representative of the modesty and complexity of Ida Vitale's poetic universe, Byobu flushes the world with meaning and playfully offers another way of inhabiting the every day.

We begin where we end: what happened in this rundown apartment, closed off from the world?

It was as if we'd reached the minimum critical point of a mathematical curve. Imagine a parabola. Zero point down, at the bottom of an abyss. That's how low we sank.The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc.For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.

In his second novel, Daniel Saldana Paris has created a bone chilling, exact portrait of a hypersensitive childhood that must torture and repeat itself in the mind of the protagonist.

Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories centre around music that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Nazi concentration camps, and so on.. But when do we end a story? When do we decide to sing the final lullaby?

Lucia and Pablo are a couple, school teachers who left Colombia to make a living in the US. While Pablo keeps fond memories of his motherland and a close relationship with his family, Lucia rejects all notions of patriotism and nostalgia. After struggling to conceive for a long time, Lucia finally gets pregnant with twins - but shuts Pablo out.

This is a story narrated from the point of view of a nine-year old girl, called Tamara, who takes in the intricacies of the survival strategies of the world she inherits, marked by poverty, unspeakable trauma, and inescapable scenarios.