In 1991, Paco Taibo II wrote The Shadow of a Shadow, a book about four men who meet to play dominos in a hotel bar in Mexico City. The time is 1922, and the men are a motley group—a poet who makes a living writing advertisements for patent medicine, a radical Chinese-Mexican union organizer, a lawyer who represents prostitutes, and a newspaper crime reporter who churns out pages of copy "like links of sausage in a chorizo factory." As the story builds, the crime novel becomes a tale of international intrigue. Returning as Shadows revisits these men nearly twenty years later. Much has changed, in the world and for the four friends. War rages in Europe while the world waits for the in Europe while the world waits for the inevitable entry of the United States. German agents throng Mexico City, working to bring America's southern neighbor into the Axis. And the four men? They've gone four different ways. Returning as Shadows goes back and forth between these men's lives, slowly drawing the threads back together. Surprises keep popping up. For example, Ernest Hemingway, having overindulged at his Cuban hacienda, is suddenly transported into a poker game with one of the characters. The men are indeed shadows, their experiences dreamlike but bursting with meaning. Read, and see why Le Monde calls Taibo "one of the best narrative clowns of our time."

Returning as Shadows

Literature & Fiction

Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Ezra E. Fitz

Literary

Thomas Dunne Books

An acclaimed detective thriller, one of the New York Times best books of the year, features a high-ranking police officer in Mexico City who covers up a murder while fighting the Mexican mafia. Reprint.

Algunas Nubes (Spanish Edition)

World Literature

Alfaguara / Vintage Books

Return to the Same City

The last Hector Belascoaran Shayne mystery from Paco Ignacio Taibo II ended with the one-eyed detective lying in the oily rain of Mexico City, his body perforated with bullets. Now the author of this hugely popular, highly political, endlessly inventive series of novels proves that no miracle is beyond his reach. Hector Belascoaran Shayne rises from the dead. He's a gun-carrying argonaut of Mexico City, city of strikes and pollution, "cemetery of dreams." He doesn't want to be alive, but he is, and when a woman tells him a sob story about her sister's death at the hands of a handsome rumba dancer in white patent leather shoes named Luke Estrella, Hector agrees to do something about him. In a Mexico City hotel the detective meets a battered, alcoholic gringo who's after the same man. On Acapulco Bay, nearly blinded by bikinied beauties, the detective shadows Estrella, who once owned porn shops in Cuba, cut off the hands of Che Guevara, and is now meeting with CIA operatives and a trafficker of stolen archeological treasures. Before Hector can decide whether he is pursuing Estrella or Estrella is pursuing him, he finds himself on a flight to Tijuana, for a confrontation with a killer.

Contemporary

MYSTERIOUS PRESS

The sweetheart of Héctor Balascorán Shayne’s adolescence-the same one who has become a famous Mexican movie star-has disappeared into the magical reality of the U.S./Mexico Border. Her daughter hires the detective to find her and bring her home. He wanders la frontera, traveling the empty roads between Tijuana and Mexicali and Juárez. Between nostalgia and reality. He falls in and out of love, he talks with the ghost of Pancho Villa, he asks lonely questions about the dirty business of narcotraficantes, and he listens closely to the story of the whores of Zacatecas. They, like his sweetheart, seem to have disappeared forever, their absence creating chaos back home. Balascorán Shayne, who at heart is an anarchist and incurable romantic, answers his own questions with two sticks of dynamite. Only then can he say goodbye to the beloved of his youth.
The Héctor Balascorán Shayne detective series are best sellers in Mexico, Latin America and Europe. In the U.S., Belascorán Shayne has a rabid and growing clan of aficionados, but to insure that the popularity of the series continues to grow, editor Bobby Byrd and translator William Verner add an Afterword for Frontera Dreams. Their essay includes a biography of the detective, a brief synopsis of the novels to date and an artist’s sketch of him. The drawing portrays all the scars on his bullet-riddled body and details in which novel Paco Ignacio Taibo II inflicted these myriad wounds on his beleaguered hero.

Frontera Dreams: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel

United States

Cinco Puntos Press

Easy Thing, An

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

FRICTION

The euphoric idealism of grassroots reform and the tragic reality of revolutionary failure are at the center of this speculative novel that opens with a real historical event. On October 2, 1968, 10 days before the Summer Olympics in Mexico, the Mexican government responds to a student demonstration in Tlatelolcothe by firing into the crowd, killing more than 200 students and civilians and wounding hundreds more. The massacre does not receive much international attention and though many students are detained, no officials are held accountable. The story then skips ahead two years to a hospital in Mexico City and introduces Nestor, a fictional journalist who witnessed the shootings at Tlatelolcothe. He has been admitted to the hospital for a knife wound, and as he lies in bed, his fevered imagination goes back to the day of the riot. In his delirious state, he becomes so desperate he calls on the heroes of his youth—Sherlock Holmes, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, and D'Artagnan among them—to join him in launching a new movement of reform.

Calling All Heroes: A Manual for Taking Power (Found in Translation)

Genre Fiction

PM Press

Pancho Villa retrata inmejorablemente a un complejo, personalmente a un complejo personaje que siempre logró escaparse del sistema, hasta después de muerto. Aquí se cuenta la vida de un hombre que solía despertarse, casi siempre, en un lugar diferente del que originalmente había elegido para dormir. Tenía este extraño hábito porque más de la mitad de su vida adulta, 17 años de los 30 que vivió antes de sumarse a una revolución, había sido prófugo de la justicia, bandolero, ladrón, asaltante de caminos, cuatrero. Y tenía miedo de que la debilidad de las horas sueño fuera su perdición. Esta es la biografía de Pancho Villa, uno de los más grandes revolucionarios mexicanos, escrita por Paco Ignacio Taibo II, implacable novelista e historiador, quien se dio a la titánica tarea de narrarnos la vida del Centauro del Norte. La Travesía de Villa, temeraria y desmedida, saturada de hechos heroicos y trágicos, siempre ha sido un símbolo atemporal de la Revolución mexicana. Description in English: With his vibrant narrative style, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, unveils secrets about the life of one of Mexico's most courageous and charismatic leaders -going through the most peculiar aspects of his personality to his most defining moments transforming a nation-. Pancho Villa is the portrait of a controversial character show was known for always being on the run, even after his death.

Pancho Villa (Spanish Edition)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Planeta-ABG

The Shadow of the Shadow

The Shadow of the Shadow follows four men who meet to play dominos in a hotel bar in Mexico City in 1922. They are a motley group—a gun-toting poet who makes a living writing advertisements for patent medicine, a radical Chinese-Mexican union organizer, a lawyer who represents prostitutes, and a newspaper crime reporter who churns out pages of copy “like links of sausage in a chorizo factory.”
 Left to their own devices, the group would have waited out Carranza’s presidency in their own quietly besotted fashion, ignoring the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution. But they witness a series of strangely related murders and begin to suspect a conspiracy involving the oil-rich lands of the Gulf Coast, greedy army officers, and American industrialists.
 Critics have hailed The Shadow of the Shadow as the best of Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s historical novels. Issues of oil, American imperialism, extortion, and government corruption give the novel a distinctly contemporary ring.

Ernesto guevara "che" Paperback
by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Ernesto guevara "che"

Vier Hände

Unionsverlag

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Books by Paco Ignacio Taibo II