Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is one of the most alluring and memorable characters in the fiction of the last twenty-five years. His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Alvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.

Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013) was born in Bogotá, Colombia. As a child he lived in Brussels, returning to Bogotá to complete his education, and lived in Mexico from 1956 until his death. Mutis was the author of poetry, short stories, and novels. His first poems were published in 1948, his first short stories in 1978, and his first novella, The Snow of the Admiral--the initial volume of the Maqroll series--in 1986. He received many literary awards, including the Prix Medicis in 1989 and the 2002 Neustadt Prize for Literature.

Francisco Goldman is the author of four novels, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, The Divine Husband, the forthcoming Say Her Name, and one work of nonfiction, The Art of Political Murder.

Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by leading contemporary Spanish-language writers, including Garbiel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and, of course, Álvaro Mutis. Her most recent translation is Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat and she is currently at work on Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of La Mancha.