The Mangy Parrot in Bloomington, MN

Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi¹s experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel the first to be published in Latin America after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of
The Mangy Parrot
(
El Periquillo Sarniento
) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain.
Though never before published in its entirety in English,
has become a Mexican classic beloved by generations of Latin American readers. Now, in vibrant American idiom, translator David Frye captures the exuberance of Lizardi's tale-telling as the author follows his narrator and alter ego, Periquillo Sarniento, through a series of misadventures that exposes the ignorance and corruption plaguing Mexican society on the eve of the wars for independence. Raw descriptions of colonial street life, candid portraits of race and ethnicity, and barely camouflaged attacks on colonial authority fill this comic masterpiece of world literature the
Don Quixote
of Latin America.