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Statistics |
| Unique Visitors: 121 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 149173 |
| Visitors Out: 2506 |
| Total Visitors Out: 3469 |
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| Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The King's Gold |
| 2008-04-29 09:01:32 |
John Spurling reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The King's Gold.
“There is now an idiotic tendency to despise action in novels,” says a literary critic in Arturo Perez-Reverte's third novel, The Dumas Club, published in 1993. He is defending Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers and its sequels against the accusation that they are not sufficiently serious. Since Perez-Reverte has made his name with...
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| Ildefonso Falcones: Cathedral of the Sea |
| 2008-04-29 08:45:09 |
Tom Gaisford reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea.
Cathedral of the Sea is as sculpted and fluid a tale as the image conjured up by its picturesque title. Originally written in Spanish, the international bestseller appears now in an impressively graceful translation which captures beautifully the archaic and lyrical tone of the narrative. Drawing on the chronicle of Pedro III,...
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| Albert Sánchez Piñol: Pandora in the Congo |
| 2008-04-29 08:37:46 |
Christian House reviews Albert Sánchez Piñol's Pandora in the Congo.
It's no surprise that in these confused metro-sexual times a resistant force should be celebrating the kind of manly yarns mastered by Victorian and Edwardian popular novelists. The fatalistic trajectories of military endeavours and grand expeditions have gripped a new brace of writers. The late, lamented George MacDonald Fraser...
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| Ildefonso Falcones - Cathedral of the Sea |
| 2008-04-29 08:25:34 |
Michael Eaude reviews Ildefonso Falcones' Cathedral of the Sea.
In the 14th century, Catalonia's ships dominated the western Mediterranean. Its merchants opened offices in every port to Alexandria and built fabulous mansions on Barcelona's Carrer Montcada. But the empire was overstretched. Mid-century, plague halved the population. The king taxed the Jews to finance his wars and his nobles...
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| PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize |
| 2008-04-17 08:32:57 |
Margaret Jull Costa's translation of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias has won The PEN/ Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. The Maias is part of the Dedalus project with Margaret Jull Costa to translate all of Eça de Queiroz's work into English, with funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation in London and the Camões Institute and the Portuguese Book Institute in Lisbon. The Maias is the sixth...
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| Subcomandante Marcos: The Speed of Dreams |
| 2008-04-09 09:28:17 |
City Lights just released Subcomandante Marcos' The Speed of Dreams.
From the City Lights site:
Since the publication of Our Word is Our Weapon – which Publishers Weekly described “as strong as dignity and as subtle as love” – Mexico’s enigmatic Zapatista leader has written some of his most brilliant and complex works. From a retelling of indigenous myths and legends, to visions of the future of...
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| Pulitzer Fiction Prize 2008 |
| 2008-04-09 09:24:01 |
Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Latin American Literature...
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| International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award |
| 2008-04-02 11:05:37 |
Javier Cercas shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with "The Speed of Light".
The shortlist also comprises Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Irish), The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneraratne (Sri Lankan), De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanese), Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australian), Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israeli), The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (...
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| Jose Rodrigues dos Santos: Codex 632 |
| 2008-04-02 05:07:59 |
Matthew Narby reviews José Rodrigues dos Santos' Codex 632: The Secret Identity of Christopher Columbus.
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code spawned an entire genre of fiction in which a hero searches the globe for a vital but lost historical object. José Dos Santos’s Codex 632 fits into this pattern.
Its main protagonist is Thomas Noronha, a middle-aged history professor at the New University in...
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| Planeta-Casamérica Iberoamerican Narrative Award |
| 2008-04-02 04:31:16 |
The board of judges in Buenos Aires announced Chilean writer Jorge Edwards as the winner of the second Planeta-Casamérica Iberoamerican Narrative award for his novel, “The House of Dostoievsky”.
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Chilean Literature...
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| Isabel Allende: The Sum of Our Days |
| 2008-03-28 13:21:41 |
Michael Jacobs reviews Isabel Allende's The Sum of Our Days.
Isabel Allende's memoir begins with the author lying wide awake on an exceptionally stormy Californian night. She is disturbed not, by the ferocious wind or the rain but, by a superstitious fear. For it is the eve of 8 January, the day on which for the past 25 years she has always begun the writing of a new book. She feels that if she...
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| Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night |
| 2008-03-28 13:19:20 |
Nicholas A. Basbanes reviews Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night.
The 19th century British scholar John Willis Clark once defined a library as a "gigantic mincing-machine into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a slightly altered form as the literature of the present." Clark also regarded libraries as museums in the sense that each is "a temple or haunt of the...
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| Antonio Lobo Antunes: Knowledge of Hell |
| 2008-03-20 09:49:55 |
Andrew Ervin reviews António Lobo Antunes' Knowledge of Hell.
Readers of the newly translated Portuguese novel Knowledge of Hell will not be surprised to learn that its author, António Lobo Antunes, is also a practicing psychiatrist. It's difficult to name another artist who better understands the subtle ways in which memory constantly affects our conscious, in-the-present thought processes. W. G...
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| Tomas Eloy Martinez: The Tango Singer |
| 2008-03-12 10:50:03 |
John Brzezinski reviews Tomás Eloy Martínez' The Tango Singer.
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Argentine Literature...
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| Juan Rulfo: Pedro Paramo |
| 2008-03-12 09:58:25 |
Jim Lewis reviews Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo.
It's a very strange book; let me admit that at the outset. It's as primitive and uncanny as a folk tale, plain-spoken but infinitely complex, a neat little metaphysical machine—one of those small, perfect books that remake the world out of paradox, like Waiting for Godot, or Nadja.
When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few...
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| Jose Saramago: Seeing |
| 2008-03-11 11:35:17 |
Chiron reviews José Saramago's Seeing.
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Portuguese Literature...
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| Santiago Gamboa: Los Impostores |
| 2008-03-07 06:20:07 |
Nathalie Vuillemin [fr] reviews Santiago Gamboa's Los Impostores (Les Captifs du Lys Blanc in the french edition).
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Colombian Literature...
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| José Carlos Somoza: La caverna de las ideas |
| 2008-03-06 11:03:48 |
AnthivS [ES] writes about José Carlos Somoza's La caverna de las ideas (The Athenian Murders).
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Spanish Literature...
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| Premio Antonin Artaud en México |
| 2008-03-06 10:29:27 |
Mexican writer Juan Villoro was awarded the "Premio Antonin Artaud en México" for his book "Los culpables".
Por el libro "Los culpables", el escritor mexicano Juan Villoro recibió anoche el V Premio de Narrativa "Antonin Artaud en México", dotado de 80 mil pesos, la traducción al francés de la obra y una escultura elaborada por los artistas plásticos Arturo Guerrero y Marisa Lara.
Poco antes de...
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| Federico García Lorca |
| 2008-03-06 10:24:44 |
Murali RamaVarma writes about Federico García Lorca's poem Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)
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Spanish Literature...
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| Manoel de Oliveira |
| 2008-03-06 10:22:29 |
Dennis Lim on Manoel de Oliveira.
When referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase "world's oldest active filmmaker." The operative word is "active." Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). His late-career surge, a gratifyingly long goodbye, defies...
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| Juan Eslava Galan: The Mule |
| 2008-03-04 09:24:57 |
Kristina Lindgren reviews Juan Eslava Galán's The Mule.
Ah, the romance of fighting for a cause. Remember the Spanish Civil War, that heroic conflict between leftists and fascists that so entranced the 1930s mass media and served as an opening act for the great European clash to come?
But as Spanish writer Juan Eslava Galán shows in his sly, Fellini-esque novel, "The Mule" (Bantam: 294 pp., $12...
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| Carmen Laforet: Nada |
| 2008-02-29 11:43:09 |
Emma Hagestadt reviews Carmen Laforet's Nada.
Published in Spain in 1945 when she was just 23, Carmen Laforet's prize-winning novel has been in print ever since. 18-year-old Andrea, the novel's hopeful young narrator, arrives in Barcelona to live with her grandmother, uncles and aunts in a "stagnant, rotting" apartment on the Calle de Aribau.Read More
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| Antonio Skármeta: The Dancer and the Thief |
| 2008-02-28 11:37:16 |
Joan Frank reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.
"The Dancer and the Thief" is Skármeta's valentine for Chile's exhausted human capital, the lost, the loose, the marginalized. A shrewd awareness is at work here, one that does not preclude joy, but owes much to the bittersweet comprehensions of the tango. "Suicide was an undignified act," Gray muses, walking along the Mapocho. One...
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| Jose Saramago: Death At Intervals |
| 2008-02-25 11:43:29 |
Lindy Burleigh reviews José Saramago's Death At Intervals.
'Now life is truly beautiful,' proclaim the citizens of the unnamed fictional country in José Saramago's new novel, when suddenly, one New Year's Day, people stop dying. Granted, it's an implausible scenario, but we are asked to take nothing seriously, except for the author himself.
We know, too, that Saramago is not going to stick to...
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| Antonio Skarmeta: The Dancer and the Thief |
| 2008-02-25 11:27:36 |
Jonathan Yardley reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.
Obviously the outcomes of both courtships must be left for the reader to discover, but The Dancer and the Thief is much more than an agreeable caper. Though Skarmeta scarcely ranks at the very top of Latin America's remarkably distinguished and varied literary elite, he is a serious writer to whom the death and rebirth of...
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| Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas |
| 2008-02-25 10:13:38 |
Andrew Ervin reviews Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas.
Bolaño's genius then, lies not only in telling a series of compelling stories, nor even in piling those up to form a larger narrative about a particular and unfortunate (if make-believe) artistic movement, but also in gently prodding us to ask some important questions about our own literary establishment.
Readers new to Bolaño...
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| Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles |
| 2008-02-19 12:01:33 |
Katie Goldstein reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles.
Through a series of wartime memories, many including Olvido, Pérez-Reverte takes us to the burning oil fields of Kuwait, to the war-torn Balkans, to Lebanon, Somalia, Romania, Mozambique, Chad, and beyond. Meanwhile, he acquaints us with Faulques' mural, where ancient and modern war coexist, where everyone from Hector and...
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| Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives |
| 2008-02-14 05:14:10 |
Alex Abramovich reviews Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives.
The fifth of Bolaño's books to appear in English, and the first in a translation by Natasha Wimmer (who is best known for her work on Mario Vargas Llosa), The Savage Detectives was published in Spanish in 1998, under the title Los detectives salvajes. An outsize, autobiographical travelogue—in the course of which Bolaño and his...
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| José Saramago: The Double |
| 2008-02-14 05:06:12 |
Rick Moody reviews José Saramago's The Double.
The Double, Saramago's newly translated novel, is a case in point. Published in his native Portugal four years after the author received the Nobel, the novel is easy to summarize: A secondary school history teacher with the musty old name of Tertuliano Máximo Afonso finds upon renting a forgettable videotape that he has an exact double, one Daniel...
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| Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture |
| 2008-02-14 04:52:38 |
Damon Krukowski reviews "Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture".
The late-'60s Brazilian pop music movement known as Tropicália or Tropicalismo is—like Dylan's "Basement Tapes"—highly "overdetermined," as they say in grad school, and therefore a good candidate for a Geertz or Marcus-like "unpacking." But Christopher Dunn's book on the subject, Brutality...
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| Interview with Juan Goytisolo |
| 2008-02-14 04:49:07 |
Peter Bush interviews Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo.
My family was destroyed. My mother was killed. I was a child of the war, as I describe in Forbidden Territory, a war followed by more than thirty years of General Franco's dictatorship. By the age of eighteen I had decided to abandon a Spain where I knew work such as my novel Fiestas would never be published. Although I was part of a group of...
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| Mario Vargas Llosa: The Feast of the Goat |
| 2008-02-14 04:44:00 |
Francisco Goldman reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat.
The Feast of the Goat, nearly documentary in tone, is a dense, dramatic, at times almost unbearably cruel and relentless political novel. It belongs to the illustrious tradition of the Latin American–dictator novel, in this case the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. But it is also a culmination of two searches...
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| Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute |
| 2008-02-14 04:37:48 |
Jason Weiss reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille—the last book published in Cortázar’s lifetime, it appeared in Spanish in 1983 and is now available in a fluid and felicitous English translation by Anne McLean—figures among his most playful works, its tone recalling, in a lighter vein,...
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| Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute |
| 2008-02-14 04:36:21 |
Nicole Gluckstern reviews Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Los autonautas de la cosmopista).
Certain travelogues can be likened to love letters to a destination, though rarely does actual romance play a part in their construction. But when acclaimed postmodern Argentine author Julio Cortázar took to the road with his third wife, Carol Dunlop, it was a journey...
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| Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas |
| 2008-02-14 04:35:02 |
bookforum.com just published an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.
It is probably true to say that no poet has ever been more diligent than Italo Schiaffino, not among his contemporaries in Buenos Aires at any rate, in spite of which was he was eventually overshadowed by the growing reputation of his younger brother, Argentino Schiaffino, also a poet.Read More
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| Tomás Eloy Martínez - The Perón Novel (La Novela de Perón) |
| 2008-02-12 13:21:05 |
In June 20, 1973, General Juan Domingo Peron returns to Argentina after eighteen years of exile.
He's accompanied by his wife Isabel and a large entourage. In Madrid he leaves years of disregard for General Franco's regime and the memory of a triumphant Eva Perón whose mummified body rests in he's own home. With him he takes some unfinished memories where he wants to give an image of Napoleon...
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| Héctor Aguilar Camín - La Guerra de Galio |
| 2008-02-12 09:28:11 |
La Guerra de Galio is one of the great Mexican novels of the late twentieth century.
This account of the turbulent years that followed the Mexican government's violent repression of the student uprising in 1968. However, as in any great literary work, the story goes beyond the obvious to draw a portrait of the generation that entered its adult life in 1968, its ideals, doubts and miseries....
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| Ángeles Mastretta - Tear This Heart Out (Arráncame la vida) |
| 2008-02-12 08:43:40 |
When Catalina knowns General Andrés Asensio, she is still a girl who knows little of life. However, he's a candidate for Governor of the State of Puebla, and knows very well what their goals as "cacique".
In a few weeks they marry. But Catalina, a passionate and imaginative woman, very soon discovers that she can not accept the way of life that imposed by the new situation and doesn't accept to...
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| Juan Carlos Onetti - Let the Wind Speak |
| 2008-02-10 17:56:10 |
Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski reviews Let the Wind Speak (Dejemos hablar al viento),a novel from Uruguayan novelist and short story author Juan Carlos Onetti written in 1979.
Onetti is famous for The Shipyard, published in Uruguay in 1961 – a dark story of how a man tries to save an ailing shipyard and fails ingloriously. Let the Wind Speak was written after the author's exile in Spain and is equally...
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