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Articles from SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American L

Perla Sassón-Henry: Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds 2008-01-05 07:06:00 Noam Cohen reviews Perla Sassón-Henry's Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds. THE Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might seem an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered the Internet. A fusty sort who from the 1930s through the 1950s spent much of his time as a chief librarian, Borges (1899-1986) valued printed books as artifacts and not just for the words they contained. He frequently set ...

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles 2008-01-05 07:02:00 Alan Cheuse reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles. Just as we have our one-of-a-kind popular writers these days in John Grisham and Stephen King, Spain claims Arturo Pérez-Reverte, one of contemporary fiction's great entertainers. Most of his novels take us back into European history, but now and then he has touched on the contemporary world. In "The Painter of Battles," his ...

Jose Saramago: The Double 2008-01-04 12:33:00 Michael Freeman reviews José Saramago's The Double. In his recent novel "The Double," the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago looks at the theme of identity, and just how much our personalities dictate who we are, in the story Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a history teacher in a secondary school whose life is completely shaken up one evening after he watches a routine comedy. Tertuliano is feeling ...

Bernado Atxaga: The Accordionist's Son 2008-01-04 12:17:00 David Flusfeder reviews Bernado Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son. Bernardo Atxaga's leisurely novel is a rare thing in our literary culture. Look around a bookshop's tables of fiction and you will see very few translated books; maybe a couple of contemporary novels from France, a few reissued classics from Russia and Germany and South America. The rest will be British and American. Bernardo ...

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles 2008-01-04 12:10:00 Barrie Swift reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles. Andres Faulques has spent his life photographing wars. Now retired to an 18th century coastal watchtower, he is painting a giant mural on its walls to capture what his photographs couldn't the meaning of war. A stranger arrives one day and tells Faulques he is going to kill him. The stranger is in fact the subject of one of ...

Arturo Pérez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles 2008-01-04 12:07:00 The Guardian review of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles. A man lives alone, in a crumbling tower by the sea. On its interior wall, he is painting a vast circular mural of war, melding histories and landscapes into a singular nightmare. One day a stranger arrives, and announces that he intends to kill the painter. Instead of punching the man, fleeing or informing the police, the ...

Alberto Manguel: Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey 2008-01-04 11:24:00 Melinda Harvey reviews Alberto Manguel's Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. New books crowd our view of old ones. But publishers and authors are culling while they clutter. Thousands of original titles are printed each year and a significant number of them tell us precisely which books to read and how many. There have been Melvyn Bragg's 12 Books That Changed The World and Peter Boxall's rather ...

The Painter of Battles - Arturo Pérez-Reverte 2008-01-03 05:38:00 Lorraine Adams reviews Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Painter of Battles. Until Susan Sontag disavowed some of her more arch anxieties in "Regarding the Pain of Others," intellectual debate over the depiction of atrocities was mostly a chronicle of aesthetic alarmism. Walter Benjamin’s notion that photography creates "a new reality in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal ...

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa 2007-12-10 08:56:00 Chris Barsanti reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. If it weren’t for unrequited love, our literature and film would be in sorry shape. As a clear representation of how deeply buried in our psyches this trauma is, we have seen it reflected back to us time and again: the moon-eyed lover sighing into the wind as his/her beloved walks past, blissfully unaware of the wonderful torment they are ...

NY Mag - The Year in Books 2007-12-10 05:02:00 Junot Díaz and Roberto Bolaño among the New York Magazine's "Culture Awards" choices. 1. BEST NOVEL Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) Among the abstract categories routinely killed off by doomsaying cultural critics (cf. irony), the novel has long been a favorite target. Often overlooked in such forecasts, however, is that—at least when it’s done right—the genre is ...

The Best of 2007 2007-12-07 04:38:00 Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is one of the Village Voice's writers choice for their favorite 20 books of the year. A decade after his legendary story collection Drown, Díaz seems like a different writer, but just as strong—where the earlier book was dead-serious, gory, and cinematic, Oscar Wao uses a light touch and incisive comedic sensibility to tell the story of a fat ...

Best books of 2007 2007-12-01 19:29:00 The Washington Post's best books of 2007 list includes seven Spanish and Latin American authors. The Bad Girl, by Mario Vargas Llosa; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (FSG). Irresistibly entertaining and, like all of its author's work, formidably smart. - Jonathan Yardley The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot DIaz (Riverhead). Oscar clearly is not intended to function as a ...

República y Grau 2007-12-01 18:52:00 A short story by Daniel Alarcón. El ciego vivía solo en una habitación independiente encima de una bodega, en una calle no muy lejos de la casa de Maico. Se ubicaba subiendo una pequeña cuesta, como todo en aquel barrio. No había nada en las paredes de la habitación del ciego, ni un lugar donde sentarse, de manera que Maico se quedó de pie. Tenía diez años. Había una cama de una plaza, una mesita ...

Premio Tusquets de novela 2007-12-01 18:05:00 Mexican novelist Elmer Mendoza has won the Tusquets award with his novel "Quién quiere vivir para siempre" (Who wants to live forever). Mendoza was born in 1949 in Culiacán, capital of the Sinaloa state, also wrote the novels "Cóbraselo caro" (2005), "Efecto Tequila" (2004), Dashiell Hammett award finalist in 2005, and El amante de Janis Joplin (2001), awarded with the Premio Nacional de ...

Cuban Napkin Fiction 2007-12-01 18:00:00 Leonardo Padura wrote Esquire this napkin. Read the text here. Please visit SPLALit aStore Cuban Literature ...