The Diaries of Adam and Eve

Mark Twain



Francisco Meléndez (illustrations)

Written in a very humorous style, The Diaries of Adam and Eve prevails as one of Mark Twain’s greatest works. Through the personal story of the first inhabitants of Paradise, we witness their encounters, disagreements and accidents with unexpected surprise, the consequences of which are still regretted today.

Francisco Meléndez, a master of contemporary illustration, has depicted with great talent the Edenic couple in their thoughts and feelings, providing the story with pages of exquisite prints.



Adam’s Diary:
«This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way. It is always hanging around and following me about. I don't like this; I am not used to company. I wish it would stay with the other animals... Cloudy today, wind in the east; think we shall have rain... WE? Where did I get that word-- the new creature uses it.»

140 x 210 mm; 112 pp. Hardback
ISBN: 978-84-92412-68-6

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99 Fantastic Fables

Ambrose Bierce



Carlos Nine (illustrations)

«The Grasshopper and the Ant:
One day in winter a hungry Grasshopper applied to an Ant for some of the food which they had stored. “Why,” said the Ant, “did you not store up some food for yourself, instead of singing all the time?” “So I did,” said the Grasshopper; “so I did; but you fellows broke in and carried it all away.”»

In an excellent collection of fables by Ambrose Bierce, politicians with insatiable ambition, unscrupulous doctors, non-religious members of religious orders, waffling poets, unbalanced judges and lunatics of all sorts march beside human-like lions, mice, rabbits and turtles. All this happens under the sharp and precise pen of one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century.

99 Fantastic Fables carefully selected and brilliantly illuminated by Carlos Nine, another visionary of the art of illustration.

140 x 210 mm; 112 pp. Hardback
ISBN: 978-84-92412-62-4

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The Pursuer

Julio Cortázar



José Muñoz (illustrations)

«I am as lonely as this cat, and much more lonely because I know I am, and it doesn’t. Condemned, it is sticking its claws in my hand. Bruno, jazz is not just music, and I am not just Johnny Carter.»

The Pursuer is one of Julio Cortázar’s greatest literary achievements and a classic of 20th century literature. With a magisterially-handled existential background, the story describes the final days of Johnny Carter, a virtuoso saxophonist whose life takes place on the knife-edge between lucidity and self-destruction.

Since its publication in 1959, this tribute by Cortázar to the genius Charlie Parker has aroused the passion of innumerable readers, who have considered it, like Rayuela, a formative experience. The great illustrator José Muñoz has been able to interpret with extraordinary talent the depth of this fiction in which jazz, nights of insomnia and Paris in the Fifties are the framework for a story beyond compare.



Illustrated by the creator of Alack Sinner, José Muñoz, winner of the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2oo7

18 x 26.5 cm; 88 pp. Cartoné con sobrecubierta

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Under Someone Else’s Rain

Juan Gelman



Carlos Alonso (illustrations)

«I close my eyes in the Roman sunshine. You pass over Rome, Sun, and in a few hours over what used to be my home, not taking me with you but lighting up places where I’m missing, which I claim, which claim me. You’ll warm them anyway, just when I’ll be shivering with cold.»

Juan Gelman wrote Under Someone Else’s Rain in 1980, during his exile in Rome. The texts in this book make up a mosaic of poignant reflections on exile, absence and grief. Created with a similar degree of feeling and depth, Carlos Alonso’s etchings resonate with Gelman’s words.

The combination of word and image generates an emotive statement of resplendent clarity.

160 x 240 mm; 64 pp. Hardback with Jacket

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The Great Zoo

Nicolás Guillén



Arnal Ballester (illustrations)

«In the aquarium of the Great Zoo, / swims the Caribbean. This seagoing / and enigmatic animal / has a crystal crescent, a blue back, a green tail, / a belly of dense coral, / gray fins of cylcone speed. In the aquarium, this inscription: “Beware: it bites”.»

An unusual bestiary and a surprising book of tales in which poetry, humour and social commentary flow together, The Great Zoo is one of the key works in Latin American poetry. Guillen’s astonishing verbal power achieves its maximum expression in these texts

With these illustrations, Arnal Ballester, winner of the National Prize for Illustration 2008, has managed to establish a surprising dialogue with the words of the great Cuban poet, to create a work without compare.

Arnal Ballester, National Prize for Illustration 2008

160 x 240 mm; 64 pp. Hardback with Jacket | ISBN: 978-84-96509-38-9

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Poe

Jordi Sierra i Fabra



Alberto Vázquez (illustrations)

«Some days they were forced to eat bread and molasses. There was nothing else. Maria Clemm did needlework. Virigina was too weak. They often went cold rather than use fuel for the stove; but they could not scrimp on whale oil or petrol for the lamp, because in the dark it was impossible to write.»

In these pages, Edgar Allan Poe’s life is given its human dimension, that of a writer whose genius must struggle against adversity. Scandal, misery, death, madness and, throughout it all, the forging of a sublime body of work, fill the days and nights of a creative visionary, one who was marked by tragedy.

Jordi Sierra i Fabra, winner of the National Prize for Young People’s and Children’s literature, has succeeded in creating a vivid portrait of Poe and his work, which Alberto Vázquez has endowed with extraordinary images.

Jordi Sierra i Fabra was nominated for Hans Christian Andersen Award 2010

160 x 140 mm; 58 pp. Paperback

The Bloody Countess

Alejandra Pizarnik



Santiago Caruso (illustrations)

«Sitting on her throne, the countess watches people under torture, she listens to their screams. Her ancient, vile servant women are silent figures who bring fire, knives, needles, manacles; who torture young girls, then later bury them. Like the manacles or the knives, these old hags are instruments of possession. This dark ceremony has but a single, silent spectator.»

Accused of murdering six hundred young girls, Erzsebet Bathory is one of the most sinister criminals in history. In her castle in the Carpathians, at the end of the 17th century, the countess crouches over her victims to bleed them to death and steal their youth. Her evil, fascinating legend has survived over the ages.

The Bloody Countess is one of the key works by Alejandra Pizarnik. Its pages are a masterful portrait of sadism and madness, which the prints of the artist Santiago Caruso recreate to the point of perfection.

180 x 265 mm; 88 pp. Hardback with Jacket

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Arthur Gordon Pym

Edgar Allan Poe



Luis Scafati (illustrations)

«Comprising the details of a mutiny and atrocious butchery on board the american brig Grampus, on her way to the south seas, in the month of june, 1827 with an account of the recapture of the vessel by the survivers; their shipwreck and subsequent horrible sufferings from famine; their deliverance by means of the british schooner Jane Guy; the brief cruise of this latter vessel in the antarctic ocean; her capture, and the massacre of her crew among a group of islands in the eighty-fourth parallel of southern latitude; together with the incredible adventures and discoveries still farther south to which that distressing calamity gave rise.»

Luis Scafati’s talented illustrations enlighten the delightful terrors of this novel, which encloses all the obsessions of the brilliant Edgar Allan Poe.

165 x 240 mm; 248 pp. Hardback with Jacket

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Dracula

Luis Scafati

«Dead while the sun illuminates the day, the Count awaits the return of the shadows that will awaken him; then, like a sinister nocturnal animal, he will pursue new victims whose blood will feed his immortality.»

A journey through inhospitable places and closed rooms, where life and death savagely devour each other. With his excellent illustration work consisting of more than 50 drawings, Luis Scafati pays tribute to this mythical character and to the vast imagination that has inspired vampire literature for centuries.

265 x 210 mm; 108 pp. Hardback
ISBN: 978-84-96509-50-4 / Català: 978-84-96509-68-9

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The Absent City

Ricardo Piglia



Luis Scafati y Pablo de Santis
Graphic novel

«It’s an island in a bend of the river, inhabited by the English, the Irish, the Russians, and by people who have come from all over the world, persecuted by the authorities, threatened with death, politically exiled. All the different languages are mixed together there, and all their voices can be heard. Nobody arrives, and those that arrive don’t want to return. Because that’s where the dead seek refuge.»
A journalist follows the tracks of a complex thriller: a secret museum, the story of a machine that can create its own stories, a utopian island, fictions that mix together and which exist within other fictions. The Absent City by Ricardo Piglia is a narrative tour de force in which crime thrillers and fantasy literature mix wonderfully.

Luis Scafati and Pablo De Santis have been able to interpret this giddy story to create a unique work, a marvellous example of the graphic novel.

180 x 265 mm; 88 pp. Hardback with Jacket | ISBN: 978-84-92412-12-9

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Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire



Pat Andrea (illustrations)

«Come, lie upon my breast, cruel, insensitive soul,
Adored tigress, monster with the indolent air;
I want to plunge trembling fingers for a long time
In the thickness of your heavy mane,

To bury my head, full of pain
In your skirts redolent of your perfume,
To inhale, as from a withered flower,
The moldy sweetness of my defunct love.»

Banned in France for offences against morality and good manners, the poems in this book had to wait ninety-two years before their public release.

Pat Andrea, a key figure in contemporary art, has been able to create one of the most astounding interpretations ever made of Baudelaire’ universe.

Jaime Siles (translation)

(Read the review published in the supplement Babelia here)

160 x 240 mm; 86 pp. Cloth-bound hardback. | ISBN: 978-84-92412-17-4

Bestiary

Howard Phillips Lovecraft



Enrique Alcatena (illustrations)

«There were lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could spawn, molded with devilish skill, and colored in a horribly life-like fashion. Some were the figures of well-known myth gorgons, chimeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend, black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumored blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon.»

A unique bestiary which brings together the extraordinary beings that inhabit the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Twenty-two creatures lead us to the disturbing world of the grand master of fantastic fiction. In an incredible descent into the abysses of terror, the illustrations of Enrique Alcatena show us the most disturbing and extraordinary beasts from the universe of H.P.L.

Elvio E. Gandolfo (translation)

160 x 240 mm; 76 pp. Hardback with cloth binding
ISBN: 978-84-96509-93-1 / Català: 978-84-96509-49-8

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