The Secret Gardens of Mogador

“Ruy-Sánchez’s works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry, and intelligence in a new geometry of words. . . . His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.”—Octavio Paz

“In the books by Ruy-Sánchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives, is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay they are made of. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breathes through the erotic.”—Alberto Manguel

In Mogador—the city of desire—a woman, tired of her lover’s insensitivity, decides to pose a challenge to him: She will make love with him only when he tells her about a new garden in the city. The problem is that he must search for gardens where one least expects to find them, and he may not invent them. To discover hidden gardens, he will have to tune his most powerful impulses.

Alberto Ruy-Sánchez examines the complex nature of enduring intimacy and the daily challenge of addressing the ever-changing desires of the other. He considers the perpetual quest to re-create the magical moment when paradise was first discovered in the body of the beloved.

Alberto Ruy-Sánchez is a Mexican writer and author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, many of which have been translated, including his novel Mogador, published by City Lights Publishers in 1992.

Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a professor of Spanish and the director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. Her books of translation include The Entre Ríos Trilogy by Perla Suez and Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction by Ana María Shua.