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First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asuncion, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.

Don Diego's slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man's perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Armando Duran has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.

Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986) was born in Mendoza, Argentina. He began his career as a journalist, writing for the Mendoza paper Los Andes. In 1953 he published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Mundo Animal. Zama was his first novel, followed by El Silenciero, Los Suicidas, and Sonbras, Nada Mas. Over the course of his career, he received numerous honors, including a 1975 Guggenheim Fellowship and decorations from the French and Italian governments, and he earned the admiration of such well-known writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Roberto Bolano. In 1976 Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina's military dictatorship. After his release in 1977, he went into exile in Spain. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1984 and died less than two years later.

Esther Allen is an essayist and translator from Spanish and French. Among her translations are Horacio Verbitsky's The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, Jose Marti: Selected Writings, and Jose Manuel Prieto's Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia. The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded her two translation fellowships, one of them for Zama, and the French government has named her a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at Baruch College.