Marcelo Rioseco
-
Oftentimes, we are not blown away by the appearance of a great book. Accustomed to the invisible figure of the translator, we scarcely perceive that we are reading those writers we celebrate so hearti...
-
It’s our birthday, and even we are surprised by how fast it has come. With this issue, our twentieth, Latin American Literature Today (LALT) turns five years old. When I close my eyes I can sti...
-
Difficult, inscrutable, fragile, unhandy at public life, a writer both secret and famous at once and unreachably original, Clarice Lispector’s light still shines from the firmament where the works of...
-
This interview centers on the latest two books by Christopher Domínguez Michael, both published in 2020. The first, Ensayos reunidos 1984-1998, was published in Mexico by the Colegio Nacional,...
-
What can be said of poetry that has not been said already? That it is not read; that it is the black sheep of the literary genres; that the poem returns to us our true face, or brings us closer to the...
-
Some believe no good writer will go eternally unpublished. They are probably right. Sooner or later, the readers of the future will end up discovering such writers. The circumstances that come togethe...
-
Literature, like any human activity, is a matter of great passions. Within this field, literary prizes play an important role in the recognition of contemporary literature. For this reason, it is no s...
-
There is no reason to be optimistic. The pandemic numbers grow steadily worse. Many countries seem to still be adrift. Some governments seem peerless in their incompetence; others are not only failure...
-
Horror is the trademark of the literature of Mariana Enriquez. Not of all of her writings, of course, but at least of her three most recent books. She is read as a genre writer, and both the writer an...
-
Before it was a reality, the pandemic was a movie. We never paid too much attention to such apocalyptic stories, convinced that fiction lived only in our imagination. Only now do we realize just how w...
-
A few months ago, in this same note, I wrote a few reflections on the limited number of translations into English published in the United States (around three percent of all books published in this co...
-
In a memorable poem titled “El poeta de este mundo” [The poet of this world], Chilean poet Jorge Teillier reminds us of those truths that today—in this postmodern and, paradoxically, ideologized world...
-
“I am not one of those people who finds that every translation is mystically inferior to the original. I have often suspected, or been able to prove, the opposite.” These were the thoughts of Jorge Lu...
-
On a memorable page, the British critic V.S. Pritchett grumbled about the American obsession for reading books about the United States in which facts were taken for a sort of intellectual fetish. This...
-
There are some writers who appear only transversally in the essays I have written, perhaps because they are very dominant figures, and up to the moment I haven’t written essays specifically about them...
-
We present this latest issue of Latin American Literature Today in the midst of a dire humanitarian crisis that is bleeding Venezuela dry. The dictator Nicolás Maduro—recognized as such by the...
-
It is no coincidence that this new issue of Latin American Literature Today is dedicated to the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez. One of the reasons is literary; a reason that gives us a great...
-
We are living in times of change and uncertainty. In recent months, the entire planet has appeared to be shaken by violent political and cultural transformations, not all of them positive, and some th...
-
Perhaps it is not unreasonable to suggest that Latin American literature has never been less Latin American as in recent times. This is not a new phenomenon, far from it. Literature in general moves l...
-
Along with Parra disappears not only the antipoet, but also a literature in itself; the ingenuity, the humor, and the ease of an artist whose antipoetry was a blow to language itself, to solemnity and...
-
Between the release of this issue and the last, this part of the world seems to have been stricken with every sort of natural disaster. Hurricanes and earthquakes have left regions of the American con...
-
Sometimes it can be illustrative to look at the present from the perspective of the past. It can also be devastating. I’m currently reading the biography of Octavio Paz by Christopher Domínguez Michae...
-
Today, when the second issue of Latin American Literature Today (LALT) is published, nothing will have changed in Venezuela. The political crisis of the Maduro regime has been measurable by dea...
-
Whether in a border novel, an allegory, or a journey myth, all true journeys imply crossing a border.