Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel
Set in an imaginary walled city off the coast of Morocco, Mogador traces the days and nights of Fatma, a young woman who finds herself suddenly seized by desire. As she wanders the city's maze of erotic pleasures, she encounters other desiring bodies and the desperate worlds those desires create. Here is a vital fusion of Latin America magical realism with Arabic geometric and mystical imagery, written in a style the author calls a "prose of intensities."
"This extremely talented Mexican writer . . . assumes is own Islamic roots in one of the best-written novels of recent years. He is truly a painter of dreams, who manages to fuse the most unblemished sensuality with the most transparent spirituality."—Luce Lopez Baralt
"Memorable novella about being both untouched and seized—all described in prose that mixes dreamy arabesque with crystalline precision."—Kirkus Review
"Ruy Sanchez balances a double paradox: his novella about female desire, written by a man, criticizes Islamic and Latin-American concepts of male dominance. It's a dazzling philosophical conundrum—a Sphinx-like riddle that only a king or a poet could solve. In any event, the pervasive desire in Mogador is particularized: it's the calling out of one body to another, one spirit to another, one soul to another. . . . This infatuating novella is not about eroticism; it's about love."—William Hollinger, Boston Review
Alberto Ruy Sanchez has written many works of fiction as well as literary and art criticism. He was an editor of Octavo Paz's Vuelta and is now editor and chief of Artes de México.
Mark Schafer has translated works by Virgilio Piniera and, with Cedric Belfrage, The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano.

Mogador: The Names of the Air

Literature & Fiction

Alberto Ruy Sánchez

United States

City Lights Publishers

Los nombres del aire (The Name of the Air)

RecordedBooks

Crafts of Mexico is a visual celebration of Mexican crafts, presenting page after page of full-color photographs alongside essays by leading art historians, interviews with and profiles of leading craftspeople, and appreciations by leading writers. The section on ceramics looks at the famous Talavera work from the colonial city of Puebla, and the fantastical creations of Tonalá and Metepec; detailed examinations of Mexican textiles, from Chiapas and Oaxaca, include histories of the weavings and a study of the symbolism in the patterns plus a special section on shawls. Basket weaving focuses on the well-known Seri baskets from Northern Mexico; tinwork spans from folk figures to cathedral alters; lacquerwork takes an in-depth look at Mexico’s adoption of this traditionally Asian craft; and much, much more. Beautifully illustrated, Crafts of Mexico is sure to become the authoritative work.

Crafts of Mexico

Arts & Photography

Margarita De Orellana

History & Criticism

Smithsonian Books

Tequila is a national drink of great variety and complexity, inextricably entwined with the history and culture of Mexico. Tequila is the first book in English to explore fully what has been called “that burning river in a small glass.” The book is a wonderful guide to everything you need to know about tequila, from 21 background questions and answers, to an A-Z illustrated description of all the tequila brands from the most common to the rarest, to a collection of recipes, not only for cocktails but also for tequila shrimp. Accompanying this practical information are thought-provoking and entertaining articles on the history of tequila making, from the Aztecs through colonial times to the present; a look at tequila in the movies and in literature; and poems, poetic evocations, and a short story by Laura Esquivel, the acclaimed author of Like Water for Chocolate, written especially for this volume.

Tequila

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Beverages & Wine

“Ruy-Sánchez’s works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry, and intelligence in a new geometry of words. . . . His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.”—Octavio Paz
“In the books by Ruy-Sánchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives, is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay they are made of. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breathes through the erotic.”—Alberto Manguel
In Mogador—the city of desire—a woman, tired of her lover’s insensitivity, decides to pose a challenge to him: She will make love with him only when he tells her about a new garden in the city. The problem is that he must search for gardens where one least expects to find them, and he may not invent them. To discover hidden gardens, he will have to tune his most powerful impulses.
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez examines the complex nature of enduring intimacy and the daily challenge of addressing the ever-changing desires of the other. He considers the perpetual quest to re-create the magical moment when paradise was first discovered in the body of the beloved.
Alberto Ruy-Sánchez is a Mexican writer and author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, many of which have been translated, including his novel Mogador, published by City Lights Publishers in 1992.
Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a professor of Spanish and the director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Her books of translation include The Entre Ríos Trilogy by Perla Suez and Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction by Ana María Shua.

The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth (Companions for the Journey)

Contemporary

White Pine Press

Los Nombres Del Aire

Alfaguara

Luz del colibri (Spanish Edition)

Ediciones Era

En esta edición, se reúnen piezas artesanales que nos hacen pensar en las formas ingeniosas de contar cuentos sobre animales en los pueblos de México. Estos relatos, casi siempre anónimos y provenientes de la tradición oral, con frecuencia, muestran algunos aspectos de la cultura de sus propias comunidades que se han transmitido de una generación a otra. Todas las narraciones aquí reunidas tienen en común un ingenio especial, una forma inesperada que nos toma desprevenidos; nos sorprenden cuando las escuchamos o las leemos por primera vez. En este bestiario, las diferentes manifestaciones del arte popular, junto con los ingeniosos cuentos llenan las páginas de color y espontaneidad para disfrutar una profunda belleza literaria y artesanal.

Artes de México # 133. Bestiario artesanal (Spanish Edition)

Artes de Mexico

Una novela construida como un espacio seductor, envolvente, lleno de placeres minuciosos. Una exploración de la sensibilidad deseante de las mujeres. Así como su novela hermana, En los labios del agua, explora el deseo fugaz de los hombres. Ambas se sitúan en la ciudad imaginaria de Mogador. El espacio donde se tejen los deseos, donde los cuerpos voraces se transforman imaginariamente, donde todo nos recuerda la profunda vena arábigoandaluza de nuestra cultura, como una cicatriz olvidada de nuestro sexo. 
Por esta novela, escrita con una prosa intensa y cercana a la poesía, Alberto Ruy Sánchez recibió el Premio Xavier Villaurrutia. 
Esta edición incluye caligrafías del artista de Marruecos Hassan Massoudy.

Los nombres del aire (Serie del volador) (Spanish Edition)

Joaquin Mortiz

Juan Amado, who is obsessed by his desire for Maimuna, tries to express his love through his writing in a variety of genres but never quite succeeds, in a story that interweaves Arabic manuscripts and the mathematics of mosaic tiles.

En los labios del agua (Spanish Edition)

Literary

Punto de Lectura

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Books by Alberto Ruy Sánchez