LETRAS

In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman. To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of seventeen, she begins to publish pulp fiction using a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can no longer satisfy her sense of adventure, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Snoopy y Carlitos. El sabueso de imaginación desbordante y su dueño, un obstinado perdedor, son dos iconos universales del siglo XX; y con ellos, el resto de la pandilla: Woodstock, Lucy, Linus, Patty, Schroeder, Sally... Durante cinco décadas, niños y no tan niños leyeron a diario una tira cómica que pronto alcanzó cotas de popularidad insólitas, a la vez que desmontaba ante los asombrados ojos de medio mundo el lado oculto del sueño americano.

Durante el verano de 1980, la profesora de Astrofísica Joan Goodwin comienza a formarse para ser astronauta en el Centro Espacial Johnson de Houston junto con un grupo de compañeros excepcional: Hank Redmond, piloto de Top Gun; John Griffin y Lydia Danes, especialistas de la misión; la bondadosa Donna Fitzgerald; y Vanessa Ford, una magnética y misteriosa ingeniera aeronáutica. Mientras los nuevos astronautas se preparan para sus primeros vuelos, Joan halla un amor y una pasión que nunca había imaginado, y comienza a cuestionarse todo cuanto creía saber sobre su lugar en el universo observable. Y entonces, en diciembre de 1984, mientras se lleva a cabo la misión STS-LR9, todo cambia de un momento a otro.

El 7 de julio de 1969, Perec le escribió una carta a Maurice Nadeau para ponerle al día de sus proyectos y le explicó un plan tan bello como ambicioso, en el que preveía «un vasto conjunto autobiográfico que se articula en cuatro libros, y cuya realización me exigirá al menos doce años; no doy esta cifra al azar: se corresponde con el tiempo necesario para la redacción del último de esos cuatro libros, que delimita el tiempo necesario para la realización de los otros tres. Este cuarto libro nace de una idea bastante monstruosa, pero bastante estimulante, creo».

It is November 25, 1960, and three sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of the dictatorship of General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas–the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters–Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé–speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s storytelling, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage, love, and the human cost of political oppression. Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.