Horacio Castellanos Moya Book order

The 1997 novel that put Horacio Castellanos Moya on the map, now published for the first time in English

Drinking way too much and breaking up with his wife, an exiled journalist in Mexico City dreams of returning home to El Salvador. When he decides to treat his liver pain with hypnosis, his few impulse-control mechanisms rapidly dissolve. Hair-brained schemes, half-mad arguments, unraveling murder plots, hysterical rants: everything escalates. But is his plan a dream or a nightmare?

With pitch-perfect, pitch-black humor, this saga refracts through one family's struggles a whole country's nightmare. The tyrant of the book is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, known as the Warlock, who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April of 1944 failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. The book takes place during that tumultuous month between the coup and the strike. With her husband a political prisoner and her son fleeing for his life, wealthy Haydée Aragon takes matters into her own hands. Events ricochet from one near-disaster to the next.--Publisher's description.

Laura Rivera is devastated after her best friend is murdered in her home, witnessed by her two young daughters. Determined to uncover the truth behind the killing, Laura sets out on a quest for answers.

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet parked across the street from his sister's apartment. An unexpected turn of events causes Sosa to assume the other man's identity. When he becomes the driver of the mysterious yellow Chevrolet, Sosa discovers that it is home to four poisonous snakes. With the snakes as accomplices, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on the city of San Salvador. Dance With Snakes is a macabre high-speed romp, in which violence and comedy become almost indistinguishable. The non-stop action raises provocative questions about social exclusion and the role of the media, but this novel by the author of the acclaimed Senselessness also evokes the tenderness of relations among those on society's margins. --Back cover

Acclaimed Salvadoran author Moya's astounding debut in English has a peculiarly lighthearted, and in fact comic air even as it is tormented by the violence of history ("El Pais").