Tierra del fuego / Francisco Coloane ; translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis

Tierra del Fuego -- On the horse of dawn -- How the Chilote Otey died -- Five sailors and a green coffin -- Passage to Puerto Eden -- Forgotten land -- HIdden part of the iceberg -- Empty bottle -- Lighthouse builder.

These spellbinding stories of adventure and discovery are populated with explorers, fortune hunters, revolutionaries, seafarers, ship´s captains, and smugglers. But the undeniable protagonist in all nine stories is nature itself. Southern Chile, the world´s end, with its severe beauty-cold, treacherous, desolate-finds its ideal poet in Francisco Coloane. In his stories, this stern landscape rises like a definitive symbol of the elementary and ceaseless drama of human conflict. Coloane is a master storyteller, deftly distilling the universal from the particular and the extreme. But no abstraction of this kind can do these tales justice. Their enduring beauty lies in the forceful, gripping narrative, and the elements that move it: men´s crimes and passions, and the land´s breathtaking glory and murderous wrath.