-
A Spanish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Nordics get most of the attention as of late for their crime thrillers. But across the ocean, Latin America is beginning to boil with a detective boom of its own. In fact, the region has long been at a simmer. Jorge Luis Borges himself is considered a father of the intellectual’s policial, as such ...
-
The literary pirate
Books are always in crisis, it seems, but even more so in Latin America. Though newspaper readership is picking up in many of the region’s Spanish-speaking countries, book buying has yet to follow suit. And then there is this new bad news: the region these days is producing a scant 2.5 percent of so-called “cultural ...
-
The fading boom
Carlos Fuentes’ death this week leaves us with only two of the four main authors of Latin American’s famed Literary Boom. Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa are, thankfully, still living. Julio Cortázar, my favorite, passed away in 1984 at 69. Mexican author Fuentes, known most for The Death of Artemio Cruz, was 83 ...
-
Books are Candy Hearts
Much like Valentine’s Day, World Book Day is an invented holiday. Though by UNESCO rather than Hallmark. And in place of candy hearts and roses, we are meant to give each other books. Or at least talk a lot about them. Which is great for those of us who like to read. Yesterday, in celebration of ...
-
What the Twit?
Gabriel García Márquez turned 85 the other day. In celebration, his publishers released an eBook version of One Hundred Years of Solitude (or more precisely of Cien Años de Soledad as digital rights to the English translation have yet to be approved). The news was a wonderful surprise, though mostly just a surprise. I had assumed—wrongly—that ...
-
On contradicting Vargas Llosa
A column in Foreign Policy magazine yesterday reminded me of an interview with Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa that I read several months back, which also made me think of a pet peeve of mine. We’ll call it Historical Hyperopia: the bull-headed determination on the part of humans in general (but especially those corrupted ...
-
The Best of The Best Of
In the boom days of Latin American lit, it was the mighty publishing house that could put an author on the literary map. Today, there is a new player in the game. Editors in Spain and Mexico may still wield the power of the pen—or rather of the barrels of ink. But with the WiFiazation ...
-
This Other American Life
Daniel Alarcón was wearing the T-shirt. So was Sexto Piso (Sixth Floor) editor Eduardo Rabasa. It was a white, the design hipster-simple: it read “Radio Ambulante” (Walking Radio) beside a silhouetted figure of a man pushing a radio as if it were a wheelbarrow. I had taken a bus to Cartagena, Colombia, for the Hay ...