The Mansion is a series of poetic, linked stories of a fabulist nature by Latin America’s esteemed Alvaro Mutis. Winner of the Cervantes Prize for Spanish literature and known throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and in Europe, Mutis is only now gaining the attention of North American audiences (helped by a recent New Yorker article on him by John Updike). The Mansion is his most recent collection of fiction and Ekstasis Editions is proud to publish its first translation into English.

Difficult to categorize –– neither magic realist nor political novelist –– Mutis is a native of Columbia, who has lived in Mexico for many years. Initially known as a poet, from 1986 to 1993 Mutis wrote seven novellas that have been published all over the world, winning major prizes everywhere including two of Spain’s most distinguished literary honours, the ‘Príncipe de Asturias’ and ‘Reina Sofia’ in 1997. In the United States, the novellas were published in two collections, Maqroll and The Adventures of Maqroll. In 2002 Mutis received the Cervantes Prize, the most important award in Spanish literature.

In The Mansion Mutis introduces the odd characters who inhabit a large house on a coffee plantation owned by the distateful Don Graci, and the events which force its abandonment. Alvaro Mutis’s longtime friend writer Gabriel García Márquez who writes, “One has to read but one page from any of his books to understand everything. All of Alvaro’s works, his very life, are the products of a clairvoyant, one who knows with certainty that we will never recover Paradise lost.”

ISBN 1-894800-20-6
$21.95 softcover
ISBN 1-894800-64-8
$ 32.95 hardcover
Fiction/translation
124 Pages
5 x 8
Now available