This month, we put authors from all over Latin America in the spotlight. Experience the diversity of a whole continent with 10 gems from our catalog.

Let’s start with Padre Antonio Vieira who, born in Portugal, moved to Brazil as a child and there became a renowed Jesuit preacher. He felt that the ideal sermon should make the listeners feel discontented with themselves. Find out for yourself from a collection of his Sermões.

Since he was seen as the fulfillment of a catholic prophecy, Garcia Moreno, President of Ecuador 1821 – 1875 was equally revered. Under him the country made a substantial leap forward – until he was assassinated. This biography was written by Augustine Berthe, about whom nothing further seems to be known.

Much more famous than her is Olavo Bilac, since he wrote the lyrics for the Brazilian Flag Anthem. Contos para Velhos are short stories and poems about adult themes, published under a pseudonym.

From adults to stories for boys and girls with La Edad de Oro by José Martí. He was a symbol of Cuba’s independence movement from Spain and to this day is called its apostle. Although he died at only 42, he is an important figure of Latin American literature.

José de Alencar, a lawyer, politician, and writer is probably the most famous representative of Brazilian Romanticism as well as Indianism. In Senhora, Aurélia takes bitter revenge on her fiancé Fernando who left her to marry money instead.

There’s not much money in poetry, so José Hernández earned his keep as journalist and politician in Argentina. Today however, he is best known for the long narrative poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro, considered the pinnacle of gauchesque literature.

The Brazilian Lima Barreto started to write for newspapers in 1902. Already in 1911, at the age of 30, he wrote his pre-modernism masterpiece Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma. In it, we follow the life of an army bureaucrat whose patriotism finally leads to his own destruction.

Horacio Quiroga from Uruguay also started writing early, when only 22, although he had many other interests as well like photography, chemistry, philosophy,… In South American Jungle Tales he uses the supernatural and bizarre to showcase every beings struggle for survival.

The greatest writer of Brazilian literature is Machado de Assis. However, the multiligual novelist, playwright, and poet is virtually unknown outside his own country. Esaú e Jacó tells the story of two brothers finding themselves on different political sides in post-independence Brazil.

There are many more Latin American writers that remain to be discovered (and recorded for LibriVox). Some of their finest work has been collected in Pan-American Poems: An Anthology. They were translated into English by Agnes Blake Poor.

Enjoy discovering Latin American authors in our catalog!

In celebration of the International Francophonie Day on March 20th, let’s have a look at authors from France with the following 10 gems from our catalog.

What better person to represent the nation than one who shares its name. Anatole France won the 1921 Nobelprize for literature for “a nobility in style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament”. Read his novel The Revolt of the Angels and judge for yourself.

Judging people and their quirks may have been a reason for Michel de Montaigne to write his Essays. Born into a wealthy family and brought up in Latin, he was a famous philosopher and statesman of the French Renaissance.

Marguerite de Navarre lived around the same time, and her patronage of humanists and reformers earned her the title “first modern woman”. She has written The Heptameron, a string of tales telling of love, lust, and infidelity.

Paquita Valdez, La fille aux yeux d’or, is seduced by Henri de Marcay who wants to kill her when he finds out she has another lover. But he is not the only one in this book which is part of La Comédie Humaine, considered the masterpiece of Honoré de Balzac. We also have an English translation of this book.

The masterpiece of Pierre Corneille, one of the three great dramatists of 17th century France is Le Cid. The tragicomedy in five acts is based on a medieval legend and in turn inspired operas by Handel and Massenet.

A tragic topic treated tongue-in-cheek is L’ Art de payer ses dettes et de satisfaire ses créanciers sans débourser un sou. French historian, writer, and feuilletonist Emile Marco de Saint-Hilaire has written this manual in 10 lessons.

Since his family was poor, lessons were something Jean-Henri Fabre never had; still the autodidact became a teacher when only 19, and later on France’s best known entymologist. Read his book on one of the few insects working for mankind, The Mason-Bees.

A genius of a different kind was Paul Verlaine. His first book of poems – Poèmes saturniens – was published when he was only 22, and at his early death with 51 he was hailed as one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siecle in French poetry.

At that time, Emile Gaboriau was equally famous. The journalist and novelist was a pioneer of modern detective fiction. His most famous character was Monsieur Lecoq, a young police officer, whose numerous cases kept people in suspense. An English version is available in Part 1 and Part 2.

Another literary pioneer was Madame de La Fayette, who wrote France’s first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature. Many of the characters involved in the intrigues at the court of Henri II are historical figures – except the heroine herself, La Princesse de Clèves.

Enjoy discovering new French authors in our catalog!

Russia is a huge country with an enormous diversity of her people and their customs. The following 10 gems from our catalog highlight a few of our Russian authors.

Leo Tolstoy, a nobleman turned social reformer in his later years, is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. This makes it difficult to choose from his work, but War and Peace, an epic novel spanning 15 years, is probably his masterpiece.

Another one of the great Russian authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He wrote his first of 11 novels at age 25, and his books were translated into more than 170 languages. We have not done all of them yet, but his short novel Белые ночи – White Nights we can offer to you in Russian, English, and German.

Germany and France were the countries where Ivan Turgenev preferred to live. The son of landowners was opposed to serfdom, and his first collection of stories A Sportsman’s Sketches, detailing the lives of the poor, is a milestone in Russian realism.

Lev Shestov is another expatriate, but instead of leaving voluntarily, he had to flee in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The main work of the then well-known existentialist is All Things Are Possible, or Apotheosis of Groundlessness from 1905.

The revolution caused many people to leave their homes. Roman Gul was conscripted into the Tsarist Army in 1916, but joined the White Volunteer Army only a year later. He took part in the Ice March (Ледяной поход) of 1918, one of the defining moments in the Russian Civil War.

Even when it was over, things did not settle down, and regime critics were persecuted for decades. One of them was Osip Mandelstam, forced into exile within Russia in 1934, and sentenced to correction camp in 1938, where he died the same year. The Stone – Камень is his first poetry collection from 1916.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, one of the most famous European activists of his time, also had his own thoughts about God and the State. This text is fragmentary and for this reason not easy to read, but it is still one of the best explanations of the anarchist philosophy of history.

Back to the Silver Age of Russian history, and to Leonid Andreyev. Coming from a middle class family, he eventually became the most prolific and representative writer of short stories of this age. His last work is Satan’s Diary about an unfortunate holiday trip the devil takes in Europe.

The physician Anton Chekhov is the author of what critics believe are the best short stories in history. He also wrote numerous plays in realist style, and the one-act play Der Bär, by himself called a joke, deals with the visit of a money lender to a recently widowed woman. An English version is available.

Katerina, Die Lady Makbeth des Mzensker Landkreises, will not wait until her husband dies before taking a lover, and from there things go downhill. This is one of the major works of Nikolai Leskov, who was praised for his unique writing style even by some of the more famous writers mentioned above.

Enjoy finding new Russian authors in our catalog!