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What is American Literature?
An incisive, thought-provoking, and timely meditation, at once panoramic and synoptic, on American literature for an age of xenophobia, heightened nationalism, and economic disparity.The distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the nation's identity through the prism of its books, from the indigenous past to the early settlers, the colonial period, the age of independence, its ascendance as a global power, and its shallow, fracturing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.The central motives that make the United States a flawed experiment - its celebration of do-it-yourself individualism, its purported exceptionalism, and its constitutional government based on checks and balances - are explored through canonical works like Mark Twain's The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson's poetry, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, and immigrant voices such as those of Americo Paredes, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, andothers. This is literary criticism at its best-informed: broad-ranged yet pungent and uncompromising.
A Critic's Journey
Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic's Journey, he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others' experiences. Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he's also an outsider to that culture-something that's sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America. Book jacket.
On Self-Translation
A fascinating collection of essays and conversations on the changing nature of language. From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation,a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating ones own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes têt...
Spanglish
With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America wasanointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. Spanish, present on this continent since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. The nation's unofficial second language, it is highly visible on several 24-hour TV networks and on more than 200 radio stations across the country. But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.
The Seventh Heaven
Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.
Ilan Stavans
"Ilan Stavans has emerged as Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast," states the Washington Post. And the New York Times described him as "the czar of Latino literature in the United States." But his influential oeuvre doesn’t address Hispanic culture exclusively. It has also opened fresh new vistas into Jewish life globally, which has prompted the Forward to portray Stavans as "a maverick intellectual whose canonical work has already produced a whole array of marvels that are redefining Jewishness." Neal Sokol devoted almost a decade to the study of Stavans’s work. He applies his substantial knowledge to this candid, thought-provoking seri...
Telenovelas
Drama! Excess! Men in bee suits! Often erroneously compared to soap operas of the United States, outside of the necessary and sometimes fantastical dramatic story arc, however, the telenovela differs greatly from U.S. soap operas and have regional and cultural distinctions throughout Latin America. In Telenovelas, Ilan Stavans has gathered over two-dozen essays covering the telenovela for readers to better understand the phenomenon and its myriad layers. Branching off from radionovelas, the telenovela was exported from pre-Castro Cuba during the 1950s. The essays found in Telenovelas covers a broad view of the genre, television's impact in Latino culture, as well as more in-depth discussions of specific telenovelas throughout the Spanish-speaking television audience in the North America. Also explored is how telenovelas depict stereotypes, respond to gender and class roles, and examines the differences in topic and thematic choices as well as production values unique to each country.
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies reflects the current state of scholarship in the field as analyzed by an international team of experts in the different and varied areas represented within contemporary Jewish Studies. Unlike recent attempts to encapsulate the current state of Jewish Studies, the Oxford Handbook is more than a mere compendium of agreed facts; rather, it is an exhaustive survey of current interests and directions in the field.
The Return of Carvajal
Recounts events surrounding the recovery, in 2017, of a sixteenth-century biographical manuscript by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a crypto-Jew executed by the Inquisition in colonial Mexico.
My Sax Life
Winner of 2005 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition Winner of 2005 National Medal of Arts Since defecting from Cuba in 1980—and indeed long before that in his native land— Paquito D'Rivera has received glowing praise time and again. A best-selling artist with more than thirty solo albums to his credit, D'Rivera has performed at the White House and the Blue Note, and with orchestras, jazz ensembles, and chamber groups around the world. My Sax Life is the English-language edition of D'Rivera's memoirs, published to acclaim in 1998. Propelled by jazz-fueled high spirits, D'Rivera's story soars and spins from memory to memory in a collage of his remarkable life. D'Rivera recalls his early nightclub appearances as a child, performing with clowns and exotic dancers, as well as his search for artistic freedom in communist Cuba and his hungry explorations of world music after his defection. Opinionated but always good-humored, My Sax Life is a fascinating statement on art and the artist's life.
