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Fiction. Latinx Studies. Art. "It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who, marrying true intellect with simple description of a space, simultaneously covers so little and so much ground." --Times Literary Supplement Baroni is a real person. Baroni is a fictional character. This novel demonstrates that the two statements are not contradictory. The real person is Rafaela Baroni, a renowned popular artist who lives in a small town in the Andean foothills of Venezuela. There she devotes herself to carving wooden figures, almost always religious, to curing the sick, to predicting misfortunes, to dying. Baroni dies and returns to life: twice a year she performs her own death. The ficti...
A world-spanning intellectual thriller in the vein of Sebald
The memoirs of Sadie Flemig Bozeman, a British Citizen, born in Burma and raised in China and Japan from 1926 to 1956 before coming to the United States. Sadie provides a enriching story of daily life as a young girl struggling to fit into a different culture absent her father. Raised by a step-mother she enters her teen years in pre-WWII Japan and finds herself fatherless and trapped in Japan during the outbreak of WWII. She provides a glimpse of life in war-torn Japan and the devastation in Nagasaki after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Meeting Ernest Flemig, a United States Army Officer, in post-war Japan offers her hope for a life outside of the only life she has known. My Two Worlds is Sadie's reflections on her life in two different cultures and her journey as a child, a young woman, and finally as a mother looking for stability and security for her children. An Afterword by her son provides a heartwarming reconnection to this world she left behind.
Provides an innovative and theoretically rigorous approach to the subject of testimony in Latin America. This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bolaño, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self and other beyond the human, that is beyond the sense that we can know and represent ourselves and others, with powerful implications for our understanding of history, community, and politics. Jenckes engages with the work of Jacques Derrida together with the intellectually rigorous field of Chilean aesthetic theory to explore issues related to the nature of testimony.
A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst.—Kirkus Reviews In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy.The room is kept clean and tidy, nobody talks about it and nobody is allowed to use it. It is for the president and no one else. But what if he doesn’t come? And what if he does? As events unfold, the reader is kept in the dark about what’s really going on. So much so, in fact, that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted...Ricardo Romero has been compared to Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino, and we see why in this eerie, meditative novel narrated by a shy young boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the footsteps of Julio Cortázar and a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms (such as Dr Jekyll’s laboratory), The President’s Room is a mysterious tale based on the suspicion that a house is never just one single home.
Philosophically engaged and darkly moving, the twenty stories in Nest in the Bones span three decades from Antonio di Benedetto's wildly various career. From his youth in Argentina to his exile in Spain after enduring imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship during the so-called "dirty war" to his return in the 1980s, Benedetto's kinetic stories move effortlessly between genres, examining civilization's subtle but violent imprint on human consciousness. A late-twentieth century master of the short form and revered by his contemporaries, Nest in the Bones is the first comprehensive volume of Benedetto's stories available in English.
Ema The Captive, César Aira's second novel, is perhaps closest in style to his popular An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter and The Hare
This book studies the rich repository of Latin American Jewish literature, exploring the issues of vanishing traditions along with the subject of assimilation and acculturation. It places in sharp relief the Jewish contribution to the Latin American literary boom. An important aspect of this study is an examination of the contributions of women authors to this field. It studies Jewish life in communities that are little known in either the Jewish or non-Jewish world, worlds unique within the diaspora experience. The book contains critical essays by internationally renowned scholars, along with in-depth interviews with major writers. Contributors include Regina Igel, Florinda Goldberg, Robert DiAntonio, Leonardo Senkman, Naomi Lindstrom, David Foster, Edna Aizenberg, Nora Glickman, Lois Bara, Judith Morganroth Schneider, Murray Baumgarten, Flor Schiminovich, Sandra Cypess, Edward Friedman, Ilan Stavans, Jacobo Sefarmi, and Mario A. Rojas.
In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2023 Finalist The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood. Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results. "Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." Kali Fajardo-Anstine