Spain recovers 11 unpublished poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez

Madrid - January 5 (El Mundo)

Eleven unknown poems of the Spanish poet Juan Jimenez Ramon, written between 1909 and 1915, will be published in Spain, in the 50 years of its Nobel Prize (1956).
Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) is among the "greatest" of Spanish poetry, side by side with Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca.

The known workmanship more of Juan Ramon Jimenez is "Platero y yo", published in 1914.
In 1936, Juan Ramon Jimenez left for Cuba, when the civil war in Spain broke. Later he installed himself definitively in Puerto Rico.

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Two Sons of Francisco,(2 Filhos de Francisco) directed by Breno Silveira

A review of the brazilian film "Two Sons of Francisco,"("2 Filhos de Francisco") directed by Breno Silveira, a biopic of Zezé di Camargo and Luciano, a leading country music duo in Brazil.


Both stylistically and in its tone "Two Sons of Francisco" is strikingly different from the last two Brazilian films that made a mark internationally. "Central Station" and "City of God" both had a bleak outlook on life, with "City of God" also winning attention for its dazzling visual innovations.

In contrast, the director of "Two Sons of Francisco," Breno Silveira, has deliberately chosen a style that he describes as "dry, simple and direct." Nor, he said, did he dwell more than he needed to on the Camargo family's poverty. "People always talk of misery but I don't believe in that," he said. "We are a happy, hopeful people, and I wanted to reflect that." (...)

After five months in theaters, "Two Sons of Francisco" has been seen by more than five million people, making it both the most widely viewed Brazilian movie here in more than 25 years and the highest-grossing film, Brazilian or foreign, here in 2005. The DVD version, issued just before Christmas with documentary and concert scenes added, has also broken records, with nearly 500,000 copies sold legally and 400,000 pirate copies estimated to be in circulation.

Whether the movie can come anywhere near that kind of success abroad remains to be seen, of course. But with its emphasis on talent overcoming adversity, "Two Sons of Francisco" contains echoes of recent Hollywood biopics about the lives of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, and those involved in the making of the movie are optimistic - as Brazilians usually are.

You can find the full article here.

A review of two documentaries about Peru's recent history

"State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism," directed by Ms. Yates, which opens Wednesday for a week, follows up on the work of Peru's Truth Commission, which concluded that more than 69,000 people were killed in terrorist or government-sponsored violence in Peru between 1980 and 2000. It also underlines how the war on terror was used to justify erosion of the country's democracy.

"The Fall of Fujimori," directed by Ms. Perry, which runs for two weeks starting Jan. 18, goes over some of the same ground, but much of it is based on interviews with Alberto Fujimori, Peru's president from 1990 to 2000, who is allowed to explain his strategy and claim credit for wiping out the Shining Path.

You can find the full article here.

Eduardo Lago wins the Nadal prize 2006

Barcelona, January 7 - (El Mundo)
Spanish literature professor Eduardo Lago won the Nadal prize with his first novel 'Llámame Brooklyn'.
'Llámame Brooklyn' is the story of a New York journalist that after the death of his friend Gal Ackerman, attempts to recover, among the hundreds of notebooks left by Ackerman in a Brooklyn motel, a half finished novel.

The jury of the Nadal Prize 2006 announced also the winner of Josep Pla prize for Catallan prose; Lluí­s María Todó for is novel 'El mal francés'.

The last winners of the Nadal were 'Un encargo difí­cil' (2005) by Pedro Zarraluki, 'El camino de los ingleses' (2004) by Antonio Soler, 'Los amigos del crimen perfecto' (2003) by Andrés Trapiello, 'Los estados carenciales' (2002) by Angela Vallvey and 'El Niño de los Coroneles' (2001) by Fernando Marías.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez on record

Madrid, January 9 - (El Mundo)
Spanish flamenco cantaor Juan Peña, 'El Lebrijano' and Moroccan violinist Faisal Kourrich plan to record an album based on texts by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Juan Peña took his inspiration from texts of 'El coronel no tiene quien le escriba', 'Cien años de soledad' and, from the short story book 'La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada'.
The two musicians will start recording next February.

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Colombian Film Festival features the most successful recent movies from Colombia

Miami, FL, January 4, 2006 Some of the best films from Colombia will be presented at the 2nd annual Colombian Film Festival hosted by Miami Dade College. The festival will take place Friday, January 6th through Sunday, January 15th, at the MDC North Campus William and Lehman Theater, 11380 N.W. 27th Ave., Building 5, Miami, FL.

For more information.

The festival program includes Bolivar I Am by Jorge Alí­ Triana (Bolí­var soy yo), El carro by Luis Orjuela, El rey by José Antonio Dorado, La desazón suprema: retrato incesante de Fernando Vallejo by Luis Ospina, La esquina by Raúl Garcí­a, La pena máxima by Jorge Echeverry, La sombra del caminante by Ciro Guerra, Los archivos privados de Pablo Escobar by Marc De Beaufort, Maria Full of Grace by Joshua Marston (María llena eres de gracia), Perder es cuestión de método by Sergio Cabrera (The art of losing - Based on the best-selling thriller by Santiago Gamboa), Sin amparo, by Jaime Osorio Gómez, Sumas y restas by Víctor Gaviria and Te busco by Ricardo Coral Dorado

Havana International Book Fair

Havana, Jan 4 (Prensa Latina) Cuban writers living abroad will meet at Havana International Book Fair starting February 6, and then extending to the rest of the country, in a unique opportunity to be in contact with the very best of Cuban literature.

You can find the full article here.

The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman

Review of Francisco Goldman's The Divine Husband

The Divine Husband is written in rhythms that are sweeping and supremely confident. There are long, fluent passages of description that have an almost magical lightness to them. Goldman's method is to heap detail upon detail, allowing minor characters briefly to hold centre stage, offering elaborate background histories, with a strong central story that has public and private implications. In other words, he has taken control of some of the central methods and narrative systems of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez and other South American and Central American novelists and grafted them on to a supple English prose, used as though it were a luxury of which he is fully in command.(...)

Somehow, in a way that we hardly notice, Goldman manages to weave the strands of geopolitics and sex so that they both seem like chemical properties that make up the air keeping the balloon of history afloat. As his two previous novels show, he has an unusual talent for creating a precise historical moment and, also, a superb sense of character. He is, in other words, a real novelist, and this is his best book so far.

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Guatemalan-American novelist and journalist Francisco Goldman was born in 1955 and was raised in Needham, Mass., and in Guatemala City, Guatemala. His short stories and journalistic pieces have appeared in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Goldman lives in Mexico City and in New York.

The Big Banana by Roberto Quesada

Review of Roberto Quesada's The Big Banana

In the annals of Western literature, we've had great Mother Russia as metaphor, the great open road of America as metaphor, and now, with Roberto Quesada's novel ''The Big Banana,'' we have Honduras. And what, in terms of a next big idea, does Honduras have to offer? According to the book's own characters: very little. Indeed, an obsession with the sheer tininess of things -- of countries, of ambitions and even of currencies (including the only extended comic riff I've ever seen regarding the Ecuadorean sucre's terrible exchange rate) -- is one of the funniest running jokes of this often hilarious novel, in which the pleasures are, literally, small.

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Roberto Quesada, whom Kurt Vonnegut described as "a witty, lively and talented writer", was born in Honduras in 1962. In 1986 he founded and directed the literary magazine 'SobreVuelo' and is the author of El desertor, Los barco, The Ships and El humano y la diosa which was awarded the prize of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Escritores in the US. His third novel, Big banana was also well received. He is currently First Secretary of the Honduras Embassy in the UN. His short stories have appeared in anthologies published in Germany, Russia, Great Britain and Spain. His most recent novel is the bestseller Nunca entres por Miami.

Reading Pictures by Alberto Manguel

Review of Alberto Manguel's Reading Pictures

This book is in a line of works of eccentric scholarship: Pliny the Elder's Natural History (the founding work of the genre), Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature. In this kind of work, wide and eclectic reading is put at the service of a large thesis, one which is not so rigorous as to exclude the entertaining anecdote or the curious fact. (Manguel pays homage to his master Pliny in his chapter 'The Image as Witness'.) The book is thus midway between a treatise and a book of quotations. It is too personal, too idiosyncratic, to be either the one or the other.

You can find the full review here.

Argentinian Alberto Manguel is the author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, became a Canadian citizen in 1982, and now lives in France, where he was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are Stevenson Under the Palm Trees and A Reading Diary.

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Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas

Review of Enrique Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co

(...) Vila-Matas can, when he wishes, provide the satisfactions of orthodox narratives with ease. Generally, though, he prefers not to, constructing daisy-chains of literary allusion instead. The 19th footnote, for example, mentions Franz Kafka, Rosa Montero, Bernardo Atxaga, Leopolda Maria Panero, Albert Camus, Elias Canetti, Claudio Magris and Anthony Burgess. Only the brainiest bookworm will not feel woefully illiterate - but then that is part of the game. The long shadow of Georges Perec and OuLiPo falls across this ultimate subtext (which, naturally enough, also features Captain Nemo). Vila-Matas has produced a postmodern paradox, something out of nothing, a positive out of a negative. His non-novel is highly original, both lucid and ludic.

You can find the full review here.

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Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His first book appeared in 1973 and his novels have been translated into eleven languages.

Captain of the Sleepers by Mayra Montero

Review of Mayra Montero's Captain of the Sleepers

Unless you have a taste for graphic depictions of necrophilia, you will never feel totally at ease reading Captain of the Sleepers in public. ("She was naked, perfumed and dry, totally dry, and I'd bet not as cold as and much less rigid than anyone would have suspected," begins the offender's tender recollection of the act.) Which will complicate things a bit, because the novel--the seventh by Cuban-born author Mayra Montero--is too engrossing to put down just to avoid inquisitive glances.

While this marks Montero's first foray into postmortem sex, both her fiction and nonfiction have always engaged deeply with life's darker passions. As a journalist in Puerto Rico (to which her family immigrated in the 1960s and where she has lived ever since), she covered the bloody coup d'états and revolutions in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the 1970s and '80s. Montero's first novel, The Braid of the Lovely Moon, published in 1987 and named a finalist for the prestigious Premio Herralde prize, delved into voodoo and the overthrow of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. And the work for which she is best known, her erotic fiction--notably the novels The Last Night I Spent With You and Deep Purple--typically uses lust to explore, in the author's words, "anguish about death." Captain of the Sleepers is no departure from that tradition.

You can find the full review here.

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Cuban writer Mayra Montero was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952, but has lived in Puerto Rico since the mid 1960s. She studied journalism in Mexico and Puerto Rico and worked for many years as a correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean. She is presently a highly acclaimed journalist in Puerto Rico and writes a weekly column in El Nuevo Dia newspaper. Montero's first book was a collection of short stories, Twenty-Three and a Turtle. Her second book, a novel titled The Braid of the Beautiful Moon, was a finalist for the Herralde awards, one of Europe's most prestigious literary awards.