(2020). “From the North” and “The Chiffon Scepter”. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). The Bones of the Imagination: Hispanic American Literature Today. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). John Coleman on Spectacle Lane. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Nuevísimos: Truth and Authenticity in Latin America’s New Twenty-First-Century Literature. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Manhattan Tropics / Trópico en Manhattan. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Decals. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Everything I Kept/ Todo lo que guardé. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Sea Monsters. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Bilingual Time Capsule: Remembering Alastair Reid. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Ahead of Print.

(2020). Editor’s Note. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 187-188.

(2020). Preface. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 189-192.

(2020). Seeing Is Believing. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 193-200.

(2020). Old-Time Limeños. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 201-204.

(2020). Buenos Aires in 1949. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 205-206.

(2020). The City: Between Utopia and Common-place. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 207-216.

(2020). The Parable of the Tapeworm. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 217-223.

(2020). Meditations on a Poster. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 224-227.

(2020). Sarduy’s Fluttering. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 228-236.

(2020). The Birds. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 237-241.

(2020). Five Books by Clarice Lispector. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 242-245.

(2020). Two Tigers: Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 246-250.

(2020). The Realist’s Crucial Transition: From Conversation in the Cathedral to Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 251-259.

(2020). Remembering Pablo Neruda. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 260-265.

(2020). The Memory Quarry: On Sergio Pitol. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 266-270.

(2020). Gregory Rabassa, Eternal Master. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 271-274.

(2020). “R” Is for Rebel: Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 275-279.

(2020). Pop Goes the Boom: One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Latin American New Novel. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 280-287.

(2020). Rubén Darío through Mario Vargas Llosa’s Looking Glass. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 288-298.

(2020). Treasures in an Old Armoire. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 299-303.

(2020). Further Reading [Links] Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 304-306.

(2020). Portfolio: Jorge Macchi. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 307-311.

(2020). José Miguel Oviedo: A Celebration of Reading. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 312-314.

(2020). Kamau Brathwaite, 1930-2020: A Tribute and Literary Recollection. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 315-318.

(2020). Remembering Ernesto Cardenal. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 319-322.

(2020). A Worker Named Gabo. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 323-327.

(2020). The Word of the Speechless: Selected Stories. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 328-329.

(2020). Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 330-331.

(2020). Two Elegies of Hope. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 332-333.

(2020). Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 334-335.

(2020). Kokoro: A Mexican Woman in Japan. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas: Vol. 53, Review's Twenty-First-Century Essays, pp. 336-338.

After an absence of more than twenty years, Leonora Carrington returned to New York in the not-to-be-missed gallery show “Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg,” a small but impressive grouping of seventeen paintings and six masks dating from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, some on public view for the first time. Organized by the San Francisco-based Gallery Wendi Norris and installed on Madison

Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), the Cuban writer and artist, moved to Paris in 1960 where he became close to the writers at the journal Tel Quel. He worked as a reader at Editions du Seuil and as a producer at Radio France. His novels included De donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a Song, 1967), Cobra (1972), and Beach Birds (1993). Among his books of essays were Written on a Body (1969) and Christ

Suzanne Jill Levine has translated major Latin American writers and poets such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, and Cecilia Vicuña. Her books include Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman (2000) and The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991)

Hélène Cixous (Oran, French Algeria, 1937), a major figure in poststructuralist feminist theory, is a writer, philosopher, and longtime professor at the University of Paris VIII. She has written books on James Joyce, Jacques Derrida, and Clarice Lispector, among many other works, and may be best known for The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), her exploration of women’s writing. As playwright, she has worked

In recent years there have been several important scholarly works on Latin American comics and graphic novels published in the English-speaking world: Comics and Memory in Latin America, eds. Jorge Catalá Carrasco, Paulo Drinot, and James Scorer (2017); Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, by Edward King and Joanna Page (2018); and Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s

Luis Rafael Sánchez (Humacao, Puerto Rico, 1936), the playwright and novelist, taught for many years at the City College of New York as well as the University of Puerto Rico. His best-known plays are La Pasión según Antígona Pérez (1968; The Passion of Antígona Pérez) and Quíntuples (1985). His novels include Macho Camacho’s Beat (1976) and Indiscreciones de un perro gringo (2007; Indiscretions of

Roland Barthes (1915-1980), the French literary theorist, philosopher, and semiotician, was the author of Writing Degree Zero (1953), Mythologies (1957), S/Z (1970), and The Pleasure of the Text (1973), among other works. He taught at the Collège de France, where Severo Sarduy first attended his lectures after arriving in Paris. They subsequently became close friends, and both contributed regularly

Edouard Glissant (1928-2011) distinguished himself in fiction, poetry, and the philosophical essay. In 1992 he rivaled Derek Walcott in the competition for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he may have lost because his work is less accessible than that of his St. Lucian colleague, whose mother tongue was also Lesser Antillean Creole. Glissant’s entry into American letters was awkward. Between the

Solemnity is the last refuge of literary scoundrels. And Latin American literature attracts hordes of these pious frauds, disguised as writers and critics. Sometimes they preach about what we savages ought to think and how, and other times they peddle slightly damaged literary theories to naive intellectuals. When they exhaust those markets, they hang out the flag, stand at attention, and sing the

Telephone answering machines aren’t merely machines. They reveal the soul or at the very least the character of their owners. The authors of the outgoing messages have to confront hidden microphones, have to say something, and be brief about it. They have to compose their own librettos; thus they become authors who double as actors and even provide dubbing for them. Some of these soliloquies are ingenious

Leonora Carrington wrote “Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg” in 1969 as an indictment of the patriarchal societies women have been subjected to for centuries, with a hope that the salvation—or transformation —of our planet lay in the hands of women. With astonishing imagination and wit, the play explores women‘s issues, war, guns, violence, money, cutthroat capitalism, patriarchal power—as

“Against silence and noise I invent theWord, a liberty which each day invents itself and invents me,”Octavio Paz writes in the prologue to his book Libertad bajo palabra (1960; Freedom on Parole), meaning that the invention of a language, which is self-inventing, invents the poet—a dialectical but circular (or circular but dialectical) progression that never seems to achieve resolution in synthesis

What follows is an attempt to shed some light on the question of the literature of exile and the special problems exile poses for literature. I have no talent for analysis; I limit myself here to a very personal vision. I will not attempt to generalize but merely offer a modest contribution to a multifaceted problem. As both a fact of life and a literary theme, exile dominates Latin American literature

Mario Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 1936) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. He rose to prominence with his first novel La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero) (1963), and has been a leading figure ever since. His many novels include Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), The War of the End of the World (1981), and The Feast of the Goat (2000).

In Cortázar’s last volume of short stories, All Fires the Fire (1966), “The Other Heaven” summarizes, almost too perfectly, the Argentine writer’s vision of the world and of literature. It is a first-person narrative in which the “I” lives simultaneously in Buenos Aires (before Peron was elected President in 1945) and in Paris (around 1870). In this narrative, times and spaces are contiguous: the “I”

Holy Place, by Carlos Fuentes, the first of three novels in Triple Cross, uses movie “language” (flashbacks, sudden cuts, close-ups, longshots, dissolves) for narrative transition, dramatic intensities, and the representation of intimate process in the hero’s mind (imagine a phenomenological analysis where consciousness, as it perceives itself, is a movie). Mainly, however, movie language is used because

Julio Ortega (Casma, Peru, 1942), the Peruvian writer and critic, is a longtime professor of Latin American literature at Brown University. He has been an editorial advisor to a number of international publishing ventures, such as the Biblioteca Ayacucho in Caracas and the Archivos Collection in Paris. His books include Poetics of Change: The New Spanish-American Narrative (1984), the novella Ayacucho

By the time he arrived in Rome in 1951, the prolific Peruvian poet and artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1921-Milan, 2006) had already penned a few poetry collections, mostly written under the influence of the Spanish baroque masters and French symbolism. Italy meant for him the creation of a new poetic mode, neo-avant garde in spirit, where experimentation with structure and rhythm was crucial for

Celestino antes del alba (1967; Celestino Before Sunrise) by Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most important writers to have appeared in Cuba since the Revolution, is a poetic recreation of childhood; but, far more important, it is an outstanding verbal exercise. Arenas uses the poetic technique of semi-independent phrases, which, as they accumulate, take the shape of a fragmentary text modified and remade

Alberto Manguel (Buenos Aires, 1948), an Argentine-Canadian essayist, novelist, and anthologist, now lives in France. In his late teens he was a reader for Borges, and more recently was director of Argentina’s National Library. His many books include Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature (1983), News from a Foreign Country Came (1991), A History of Reading (1996), and Packing My Library (2018)