A Journey to Cloudland - Un viaje al pa’s de las nubes

About the Book

In this collection, seven bilingual stories showcase the richness of Latin American folklore, fantasy, and fiction. Latin American literature is rooted in the history and culture of the world from which it arises, and this book explores many facets of those roots within everyday occurrences, historical events, and traditional folk stories, sometimes using imaginary characters in real situations and other times, real characters in fanciful situations. Transporting readers to such places as the Amazon jungle and nineteenth-century Bogotá or through epic events of the Latin American War of Independence, the author has compiled, researched, and invented stories by turns whimsical and deeply moving, and has cast them, with a dose of his own imagination, in an agile, poetic language that keeps readers enthralled from start to finish.

Whatever the subject matter - be it a fictitious chihuahua (a breed native to Latin America), a fresh batch of tamales, an Amazon legend, a piñata maker, a hero of Latin American independence, a generations-old priest's tale, or a magnificent journey through Andean topography - the author leads us in among the intertwining roots of Latin American life and shows us its reality through a different prism, one in which the everyday is fantastical and fantasy seems commonplace.

About the Author

Mario Lamo Jiménez is a Colombian author who has received literary awards in Colombia, Spain, and the United States. At the age of seventeen, Lamo published his first poem in the literary supplement of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador; since then he has gone on to publish poems, short stories, plays, and novels.

His children's book El día de la ecología (Ecology Day), originally published in Colombia by Panamericana, has been republished by SRA/McGraw-Hill in the Open Court Reading series, used for teaching Spanish in U.S. public schools. The same series includes Lamo's nonfiction book Dinosaurios gigantes de América del Sur (Giant Dinosaurs of South America), first published by Silver Burdett-Ginn.

Lamo currently heads his own publishing company in Sacramento, California, and has translated into Spanish literary works by well-known North American authors, such as The Emerald Lizard by Pleasant DeSpain. Lamo is an anthropologist and has a master's degree in intercultural administration.