An NYRB Classics Original
The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for Garc穩a M獺rquez�� The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos�� I, the Supreme, Tyrant
Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American republic in the grip of a monster. Ram籀n del Valle-Incl獺n, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the
splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19th-century serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt.
������ It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach�� Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maip繳. Tyrant Banderas steps forth,
assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Mean簫while, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle
by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator�� citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden,
starving populace.
���������� Peter Bush�� new translation of Valle-Incl獺n�� seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing
as Goya�� in his The Disasters of War.
