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Travel / Memoir / Puerto Rico

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San Juan Memoir of a City Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá Translated by Peter Grandbois Foreword by Antonio Skármeta The Americas, Ilan Stavans and Irene Vilar, Series Editors An evocative, personal guide to Puerto Rico's capital city San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Juliá invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book-available here in English for the first time—Rodríguez Juliá resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives. Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico. Among his many books are La renuncia del héroe Baltasar (1974, translated into English in 1997 as The Renunciation), El entierro de Cortijo (1983, published in a bilingual edition in 2004 as Cortijo's Wake), La noche oscura del Niño Avilés (1984), and Sol de medianoche (1999). Peter Grandbois is assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. Antonio Skarmeta is the author of Il Postino For publicity information call our marketing department at 608-263-0734 or e-mail uwiscpress@uwpress.wisc.edu Also available in a Spanish edition San Juan: Ciudad Soñada Copublished with Tal Cual Editores, San Juan

Available now LC: 2006031485 F 144 pp. 6 x 9 10 maps ISBN: 0-299-20370-0 Cloth $45.00 s (ISBN-13: 978-0-299-20370-2) ISBN: 0-299-20374-3 Paper $19.95 t (ISBN-13: 978-0-299-20374-0) To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.

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