<div>This book gathers in one volume seven of the best essays written in the last fifteen years or so by the eminent Latin Americanist Enrico Mario Santí. The essays-all of which are first-rate-cover a wide range of topics in Latin American poetry, narrative, film, and intellectual history, with one brief excursion into Spanish Peninsular subject-matter: the Spanish Generation of 98's response to Spain's loss of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The essays are introduced by a long text in which the author develops a bracing critique of some dominant trends in current critical practice, and spells out an alternative methodology focused on the retrieval of local knowledge, on reading as opposed to theory, and on the notion of the "cipher" as a figure for "the ultimate ambivalence of interpretation." The essays are tied together by this common approach, which acts as both incisive challenge and demanding blue-print for the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies.</div>