Ariel Dorfman remembers Tomás Eloy Martínez.

Eran tiempos nefastos. Yo acababa de llegar de un Chile que le había prometido al mundo la revolución de Allende y nos había dado, en cambio, la asonada de Pinochet, y creo que se me notaba las muchas y recientes muertes, y Tomás lo entendió enseguida y me ofreció también de inmediato su cariño.

"Cualquier cosa que necesites", me dijo, y hallé en él una generosidad que nunca cesó hasta el día de su propia muerte. Me armaba reuniones en su casa con corresponsales holandeses y curas revolucionarios y montoneros esquivos y siempre bien regadas con vino y pasta y carnes.

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Junot Díaz receives the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award

Junot Díaz, Maxine Hong Kingston, and M. L. Liebler are the recipients of the 2010 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. Read More


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Premio Biblioteca Breve

Argentine writer Guillermo Saccomanno won this years Biblioteca Breve prize with his novel "El oficinista".
Guillermo Saccomanno was born in Buenos Aires in 1948 and is the author of novels and short stories, such as "Situación de peligro", "Roberto y Eva", "El buen dolor", "El pibe" and the trilogy composed by "La lengua del malón", "Un amor argentino" and "77" wich won the Dashiell Hammett Prize in the "Semana Negra de Gijón".


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Another Day in Medellín

Nice review of Fernando Vallejo's Our Lady of the Assassins at Blographia Literaria by Andrew Seal.

Our Lady of the Assassins reads like the result of a brawl between Thomas Malthus and Louis-Ferdinand Céline after a night of heavy and surly drinking and reading Death in Venice in dramatic voices to each other.

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This novel was made into a full feature film in 2000 directed by Barbet Schroeder.


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Manuel Vázquez Montalbán: Tatoo

Ahmad Saidullah reviews Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Tatoo.

Tattoo, the second in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho murder mysteries, first appeared in Spanish as Tatuaje (Tattoos) in 1976. The lyrics from Tatuaje “bold and blond as beer was he / A heart tattooed on his chest,” by the Catalan artist Rafael de León, a friend of García Lorca’s and Antonio Machado’s, made famous by the singer Concha Piquer, appear as an epigraph and recur throughout the book. (...)
Fans of Pepe Carvalho will be pleased, nonetheless. While Tattoo will not satisfy most readers, it provides a brief, if uncomfortable, introduction to a writer and his detective who ought to be better known to English readers.

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El burro que metió la pata (The donkey who got stucked)

"El burro que metió la pata" is a short animation film directed by Felipe Haro, based on a children's story writen by Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska in the 1968.





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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

It’s a quick, propulsive read, and while quite funny–and at times scary–it’s most fascinating as a document that further fleshes out the Bolañoverse. Highly recommended.

biblioklept on Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas




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Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction

It is a fine book for either those curious about current Mexican fiction or those simply in search of some good things to read.

Scott Esposito reviews Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction for The Quarterly Conversation. Read Here



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Júlio Cortázar: El perseguidor

Júlio Cortázar reads an extract from his short story "El Perseguidor" ("The Pursuer"), based on the life of the jazz musician Charlie Parker.

The soundtrack is Charlie Parker's "Out Of Nowhere".





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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Tim Martin reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Neither a novel nor a collection of stories, Nazi Literature in the Americas is the best and weirdest kind of literary game. Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003 and achieved fame posthumously, here presents what purports to be a survey of rightwing writers on the American continent between 1894 and 2021. He sets up a densely imagined alternate world populated by fictional poets and novelists, each comically in thrall to their own refracted versions of the fascist aesthetic. One plans a radical modernity that consists of a return to the Iron Age, while another is haunted by extraterrestrial Merovingians. One proudly becomes “the creator of the Gunther O’Connell saga, the Fourth Reich saga, and of the saga of Gunther O’Connell and the Fourth Reich, in which the previous sagas fuse into one”, while another devotes the last phase of her life to reconstructing Edgar Allen Poe’s ideal sitting-room, a symphony in dark furnishings, dim lamps and scarlet drapes. Meanwhile, characters such as Allen Ginsberg and José Lezama Lima criss-cross the flow of Bolaño’s mock-critical prose.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is not the first book to present a critique of imaginary works, but its single-mindedness makes it an oddity even in this rarefied sub-genre. Thomas Carlyle provided one of the best-known examples in his warped philosophical satire Sartor Resartus (1833), which pretended to analyse a “Theory of Clothes” put forward by a German philosopher called Teufelsdröch, or Devilcrap. Jorge Luis Borges built an entire corpus of work on books and writers who never existed, such as Herbert Quain, who wrote a recursive novel with nine different beginnings, or Pierre Menard, whose attempt to transcend translation results in a “re-authored” copy of Don Quixote. Vladimir Nabokov dreamed up an anagrammatic alter ego called Vivian Darkbloom to comment on his own work, while the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum (1971) collected reviews of imaginary books, one of which featured a Nazi in postwar Argentina who is obsessed with the court of Louis XVI. (Bolaño, a fan of science fiction, may have been paying attention.)

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Latin American Literature

Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain

Will Blythe reviews Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.

The beauty of Roberto Bolaño’s slender mystery novel “Monsieur Pain,” originally published in 1999 and now translated from the Spanish by the estimable Chris Andrews, is that it doesn’t behave much like a mystery novel. By the end of the book, which Bolaño wrote in either 1981 or 1982, the mysteries remain unsolved, the ostensible victim may or may not have suffered from foul play and the protagonist intent on figuring out who done it (if anyone did anything at all) appears incapable of doing so.

That would be Monsieur Pierre Pain, a middle-aged veteran of the First World War, his lungs seared at Verdun, now scratching out a threadbare existence in Paris by virtue of a modest government pension. In a bachelor’s dusty, jumbled room, he occupies himself by studying the occult. He has gained a minor reputation for the exotic practices of acupuncture and mesmerism, the art of hypnosis.

In April 1938, a beautiful widow with whom Pain is shyly in love comes to him with an urgent request. Her friend’s husband, a Peruvian poet named Vallejo, appears on the verge of hiccuping himself to death from an undiagnosed illness. This, of course, is the same César Vallejo who will one day be famous as perhaps the greatest Latin American poet, but here he is merely one of the first of the failed revolutionary writer-heroes — anonymous, exiled and suffering — who will become the prime movers of Bolaño’s later fiction. The mystique of the down-at-the-heels author always quickens Bolaño’s imagination. What novelist has ever shown more love for writers as characters?

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Roberto Bolaño: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Alberto Manguel reviews Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

When Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, aged 50, he could not have suspected that, a couple of years later, he would be hailed worldwide as both the prophet and redeemer of Spanish-language fiction. Prophet, his hagiographers declared, because his early books, which had come and gone unnoticed by critics and readers alike, prepared the way for a new kind of novel; redeemer, these same enthusiasts said, because Bolaño himself effected the change in his last books, notably 2666, which was hailed by the New York Times as "a landmark in what's possible for a novel".

And yet a reader coming upon Bolaño for the first time and opening Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published seven years before his death, might ask what all the fuss is about. A compendium of fictional literary lives that purports to trace major and minor examples of rightwing, conservative and reactionary literature in the Americas, Nazi Literature is at first mildly amusing but quickly becomes a tedious pastiche of itself. Like a joke whose punchline is given in the title, the humour is undermined, and all that is left is a series of names, dates and titles that, since they don't come across as funny, become merely irritating.

Fictional lives are something of a Latin American speciality. A history of Latin American literature could be compiled following that genre alone: the classic example is Jorge Luis Borges's A Universal History of Infamy, based on real characters and inspired by Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, in turn suggested by Aubrey's almost imaginary Brief Lives. Bolaño, no doubt aware of this illustrious ancestry, prefers to ignore it: not only the models, but their wit and discernment as well.

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Latin American Literature