Home Reading Service: A Novel. This item is unavailable.Home Reading Service: A Novel

After an accident \- or \x27the misfortune,\x27 as his cancer\-ridden father\x27s caretaker, Celeste, calls it \- Eduardo is sentenced to a year of community service reading to the elderly and disabled. Stripped of his driver\x27s license and feeling impotent as he nears thirty\-five, he leads a dull, lonely life, chatting occasionally with the waitresses of a local restaurant or walking the streets of Cuernavaca. Once a quiet town known for its lush gardens and swimming pools, the \x27City of Eternal Spring\x27 is now plagued by robberies, kidnappings, and the other myriad forms of violence bred by drug trafficking. At first, Eduardo seems unable to connect. He movingly reads the words of Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, and more, but doesn\x27t truly understand them. His eccentric listeners \- including two brothers, one mute, who moves his lips while the other acts as ventriloquist; deaf parents raising children they don\x27t know are hearing; and a beautiful, wheelchair\-bound mezzo soprano \- sense his detachment. Then Eduardo comes across a poem his father had copied by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, and it affects him as no literature has before. Through these fascinating characters, like the practical, quick\-witted Celeste, who intuitively grasps poetry even though she never learned to read, Fabio Morabito shows how art can help us rediscover meaning in a corrupt, unequal society.

Fabio Morábito was born in Egypt to an Italian family. When he was fifteen, his family relocated from Milan to Mexico City, and he has written all his work in Spanish ever since. He has published four books of poetry, four short-story collections, one book of essays, and two novels, and has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes, most recently the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico's highest literary award, for Home Reading Service. His work has been translated into several languages. He lives in Mexico City.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond's Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.