Playing God: A Conversation with Daniel Olivas
Daniel Olivas discusses his recent short story collection, The King of Lighting Fixtures, writing humor, and the role of religion in his work.
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Posts Tagged: Latin American literature
Sound & Vision: Celia C. Pérez
Allyson McCabe talks with Celia C. Pérez about her debut middle-grade novel, The First Rule of Punk, her inspirations for writing the book, and her own childhood.
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The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
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Vincent Toro: Challenging Whiteness and Refusing to Be Colonized
Poet Vincent Toro on his debut collection, Stereo.Island.Mosaic, his writing process, and searching for identity.
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The Rumpus Interview with Adam Morris
Adam Morris discusses Quiet Creature on the Corner, a novel he translated from the Brazilian by João Gilberto Noll, the choices he makes as a translator, and the unique narrative structure of Noll’s writing.
...moreWe Tell Ourselves Stories to Tell Ourselves Stories
It’s not like we can all launch a Kickstarter or write a book—there’ve been hundreds of books about the border, and we still have the same problem. So I get angry, and perhaps it’s less about my feeling that all this testimony is useless and more my way of raging against my own impotence toward […]
...moreReviving Dominican Literature with “a Concert of Poetry”
Global Voices introduces us to El Hombrecito, a music group that interweaves Dominican poetry and visual art into their performances, in a story written by Natali Herrera Pacheco and translated by Eleanor Weekes. El Hombrecito hopes to spark interest in the country’s literature by setting it against the backdrop of bachata, rock, or experimental music, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Will Evans
Will Evans, Executive Director of Deep Vellum Publishing, talks about publishing translated works as well as the Texas and Dallas literary scene he wants to help grow.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
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The Rumpus Review of Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
But the problem of making fiction is just one of the many problems a reborn country must figure out.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week at Recommended Reading, PEN America offers an excerpt from Brazilian author Noemi Jaffe’s novel Írisz: as orquídeas, which is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being that this is so far the only opportunity to read part of the Portuguese-language novel in English translation. Jaffe’s narrator, Írisz, has fled to Brazil from Hungary […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Vanessa Blakeslee
I don’t want to waste readers’ time with a several hundred-page novel that’s not relevant to the wicked problems we’re facing today.
...moreThe New Teeth of Mexican Literature
While reviewing Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aaron Bady considers the rise of Mexican literature post-Roberto Bolaño: Roberto Bolaño’s popularity in English over the last decade or so has had a profound effect on publishers. “The Story of My Teeth” takes part in this renaissance, but […]
...moreHow to Get More Lit By Cuban Authors on US Campuses
It’s a bear to try to get contemporary Cuban literature, especially by women. To remedy the dearth of books written by female Cuban authors on American campuses, Sara Cooper, a professor of Spanish and multicultural and gender studies at Chico State University in California, decided she’d have to do it herself. Read about her nonprofit […]
...morePowerhouse Spanish Literary Agent Remembered
The New Yorker has a retrospective on Carmen Balcells, a Spanish literary agent who brought writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Luis Borges to international fame. Balcells passed away last week at the age of 85. Balcells wasn’t just behind the books being written, she was actually in them—sometimes romanticized, sometimes villainized, […]
...moreReal, Local, Radical
A must-read profile of Sesshu Foster, unofficial poet laureate of East Los Angeles, steadfast advocate of racial equity, eloquent witness to the changes of gentrification, full-time school teacher, and arguable embodiment of the vibrant tangle of roots that comprises modern Los Angelean culture: In any other city, and in any neighborhood besides East L.A., it’s […]
...moreThe Kind of Madness That Is Passion
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with herself. Maybe never. It was always her–with others, and in these others she was reflected and the others were reflected in her. Nothing was–was pure, she thought without understanding what she meant. Another newly released story by the dazzling Clarice Lispector, “Beauty and the Beast […]
...moreLispector Revival
We’ve noticed a new wave of love for Clarice Lispector recently, and so has Benjamin Anastas at The New Republic. With the new translation and release of a complete edition of her stories, Anastas outlines how Lispector has been given the “Bolaño treatment—and the global acclaim she has long deserved.”
...moreThe Poetry of Laura Victoria
Kiss me like this – slowly. Your tongue, like a living flame, feeds my burning dreams – and after my heavy-hearted abandonment, a clean breeze brightens the jasmine in my bed. Emily Paskevics, writing for Luna Luna Magazine, profiles Laura Victoria, the pseudonym of Colombian poet and diplomat Gertrudis Peñuela (1904-2004). Paskevics provides translations of […]
...moreThe Alternate Careers and Future Projects of Alejandro Zambra
[Soccer] games on the radio are absolutely like literature—the metaphors, the pacing, the need for an evolving style. You can’t always say the same thing. The role of the play-by-play announcer seems much more interesting to me than that of the color commentator. In the end, the announcer is the narrator and the commentator is […]
...moreWriting in Exile
For Electric Literature, Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon recounts his unexpected turn to literature after returning to Guatemala in his early thirties, the paranoia and danger that accompanies being a writer amidst corruption, and leaving the country again after publishing his first novel: I stumbled onto books, and then fell into writing. But something was finally […]
...moreReading a Continent
Fear not if you don’t have any vacation plans this summer. Quartz has created a literary playlist of nine contemporary Latin American authors that will utterly transport you.
...moreMis Documentos
Over at the New Yorker, James Wood chronicles Alejandro Zambra’s ascent in Latin American letters.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
On Monday, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction was awarded to Jack Livings for The Dog, a collection set in China in the last decades of the 20th century. What makes Livings’s stories remarkable isn’t just the tight prose and impressive research (he told the Wall Street Journal that he spent a year and […]
...moreInfierno Completo
Sergio Pitol gets the profile treatment over at Lit Hub: Sergio Pitol (1933) is all of the above; he is, I believe, a total writer. And by writer I do not mean one of those intellectuals who flirt with power (“The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
Author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho speaks about his new collection, Barefoot Dogs, breakthrough stories, the writing process, and why translating his book for readers in Mexico feels like a homecoming.
...moreMario Vargas Llosa: Artist or Politician?
In advance of the release of Mario Vargas Llosa’s new book The Time of the Hero, Thomas Mallon investigates the relationship between the Noble Prize-winning author’s work and the political movements of his native Peru. The article focuses on Llosa’s realist style during a time when more experimental Latin American authors were obtaining international prestige, and highlights the author’s […]
...moreThe Literary Magician
D. Scot Miller extemporizes on Roberto Bolaño, and the legacy Latin American letters just can’t escape from, over at Gawker: Did I say that Roberto Bolano was a genius? I meant to say magician. Bolano is a literary magician; a satirical and mesmerizing novelist with a poet’s soul. There is an undeniable sleight-of-hand at play […]
...moreWhere It All Began
After Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s passing last Thursday, the New Yorker opened its archives to those compelled to get their hands on something from the “voice of Latin America.” One of the more interesting pieces in the archive is “The Challenge,” in which Marquez recalls a forty-two day span during which his first two short stories were published. […]
...moreLove to Gabo
Gabriel Garcia Marquez died yesterday at home in Mexico City. 87 years since his birth in Aracataca, CO, “Gabo” Marquez has written over twenty novels and short story collections. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and may have been the most important Latin-American writer of the last century.
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