Cuando en 1995 Laura Bush, en ese entonces la primera dama de Texas, y Mary Margaret Farabee fundaron el Texas Book Festival no se imaginaron que estaban iniciado una de las ferias más importantes de los Estados Unidos. En los veinticuatro años de su existencia ocupa hoy en día uno…
All posts under literature
La China Iron canta el Martín Fierro (book review)
Book Review: Blanca Busquets’s The House of Silence
Both mysterious and romantic, Catalan writer and journalist Blanca Busquets’s The House of Silence demonstrates how music can unknowingly bind together even the most distant people. Over the course of the narrative, we eagerly learn about the lives of these four disparate characters in early 20th century Spain, whose only connection is…
An Interview with Roberto G. Fernández
Roberto G. Fernández is a Cuban American writer whose work across the past three decades has presented a fragmented but expansive landscape of the Cuban American community in Miami and beyond. His work is populated by a recurring cast of carnavalesque characters who present a fluid and humorous depiction, and a thoughtful…
Book Review: The Year 200
The Year 200 by Agustín de Rojas Translated by Nick Caistor and Hebe Powell Published July 12, 2016 Restless Books There’s a reason that Agustín de Rojas is described as the grandfather of Cuban science fiction. I read all 500+ pages of The Year 200, in an excellent new English translation by Nick…
Book Review: Tace Hedrick’s Chica Lit
In her book Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, Tace Hedrick draws attention to a subgenre of women’s fiction that has grown increasingly popular in the midst of recent US obsession with all things Latina/o: chica lit. Right alongside the glorification of the breakfast taco and…
Sandra Cisneros at the Texas Book Festival
Reading Junot Díaz with Incarcerated People
I appreciate the fact that my first teaching experience as a graduate student was in a jail. Through an initiative started by the Graduate Comparative Literature Students (GRACLS) organization, I volunteered to teach a Reading World Literature course at the Travis County Correctional Complex (TCCC), a pre-trial facility (a jail…
Literatura digital. Revistas universitarias y las nuevas habilidades para escribir y publicar
Central America(ns) in Chicana Literature
As promised in my last post, I am moving along from the current views on Central American immigration and «unaccompanied minors» to discuss Central America, Central Americans, and Central American-Americans in literature. My argument today will be focused particularly on Central America as a literary symbol, particularly in the works…
Organización invitada: ELADD. Una iniciativa para los estudios decimonónicos
An English translation of this post follows. Es un hecho que los que trabajamos siglo XIX nos enfrentamos a una falta de espacios para la publicación de artículos críticos y de análisis, especialmente que hablen de literatura escrita por mujeres; ni que decir de espacios que sirvan de repositorios de obras…
Musings on Grandmothers and the Space of Storytelling
The other day in my Latin American Cultures, Environment and Development class, we participated in a story-telling activity with the guide of a representative from Pachaysana, an NGO working out of Ecuador. We did a series of slightly awkward activities that included making human sculptures and moving around the room…
Buena crítica para descubrir el cuento español: Ángeles Encinar
[An English translation of «A good critic from whom to discover the Spanish short story: Ángeles Encinar« follows.] No cabe duda que los encuentros valiosos suceden en el momento y en el lugar menos esperado. En el mes de abril, fui a Varsovia, Polonia a un congreso sobre literatura, identidad y género.…
Pterodactilo Bloggers At Large
Did you know that in addition to being talented bloggers, the writers at Revista Pterodáctilo are active scholars? If you’re intrigued by what you’ve read on the Pterodáctilo blog, consider following up with some of these academic articles produced by our writers in the past year: Adriana Pacheco has published two…
A reflection on Junot Díaz’s «MFA vs. POC»
Gabo vs. A Lifetime of Absolute Normalcy
Remembering Gabriel García Márquez, Edwidge Danticat writes: I am often surprised when people talk about the total implausibility of the events in García Márquez’s fiction. Having been born and lived in a deeply spiritual and extraordinarily resourceful part of the Caribbean, a lot of what might seem magical to others…
Recalling Eréndira and Thinking of García Márquez
Una llovizna de minúsculas flores
Entonces entraron al cuarto de José Arcadio Buendía, lo sacudieron con todas sus fuerzas, le gritaron al oído, le pusieron un espejo frente a las fosas nasales, pero no pudieron despertarlo. Poco después, cuando el carpintero le tomaba las medidas para el ataúd, vieron a través de la ventana que…
Crossing Disciplines
In my last post, I wrote about the limits of academic writing, and asked what to do when scholarly forms are insufficient. This week, inspired by a talk by Elijah Meeks at the TXDHC conference (that’s «Texas Digital Humanities Consortium conference), I am writing about interloping. What do you do when…
