Search Results for: lat

Orner’s Second

Peter Orner’s debut novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, is reviewed over at the Star Tribune.

Peter Orner’s “The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” is a departure in two ways. First, anyone who read his exquisite debut collection, “Esther Stories,” will be flat-out flabbergasted that he has leapfrogged from urban Jewish Chicago to the veld of Namibia in 1991.

Moreover, this is not a story about Americanness — or the complicated ways in which a particular kind of white American posture of helping clashes with African ways. Rather, it’s a kind of “Winesburg, Ohio” that just happens to be set in the shadow of the Erongo Mountains.

Intrigued? More here.



Civil Rights Journalism, Of Sorts

Speaking of Ilan Stavans, here is an essay he wrote for this weekend’s San Francisco Chronicle, in which he wonders why, in a 1,000-page, two-volume work on civil rights in America, there is no mention of Latinos–not even César Chávez.

The set first appeared in 2003, and reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, even The Chronicle failed to point out the omission. The anthology, which covers events from 1941 to 1973, showcases “eyewitness accounts of over 150 writers [offering] a panoramic perspective on the struggle to bring an end to segregation in the United States.” The authors range from John Steinbeck to Murray Kempton and James Baldwin, from Joan Didion and Howard Zinn to Alice Walker. It includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” accounts on busing, attacks on President Dwight Eisenhower and the effectiveness of sit-in movements. The advisory board responsible for the books is composed of a senior editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. papers, a distinguished faculty member at Emory University, the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and a professor at Indiana University. In other words, a conscientious bunch.

Conscientious, but amnesic.

Read it all here. And then weep.



New Fuentes

Ilan Stavans is not too impressed with Carlos Fuentes’s new novel, The Eagle’s Throne, as you can see from his Boston Globe review:

The fact that Fuentes’s place in the Mexican literary canon is often debated isn’t surprising. His output is at once prodigious and infuriatingly inconsistent. Maybe the problem is that his politics keep intruding. He writes fiction as if it were an op-ed piece. (…) Toward the end of the novel, Rosario Galván says, “I look back on the people, the places, the situations since the crisis began in January, and I find that there’s no sense of taste in my mouth. . . . My tongue and palate taste of nothing at all.” Regrettably, I sense the same tastelessness. Is this a novel? It reads like an opinion commentary. Not only is it hastily executed, but the attention to character is embarrassing. After reading several letters, it becomes clear that all were crafted by the same hand — Fuentes’s. And the busy plot looks to me like wasted talent.

You can read it all here. (You can use bugmenot for a free login.)



Keret & El-Youssef

Terri Gross, the host of Fresh Air on NPR, interviews Israeli writer Etgar Keret (The Nimrod Flip-Out) and Palestinian writer and critic Samir El-Youssef about their perspectives on the war. You can listen online.

You may remember that Keret and El-Youssef co-authored a collection of stories called Gaza Blues. My favorite anecdote about this collaboration is one Keret told (I can’t find the reference; I think it was in a Nextbook interview a year ago, maybe) about a reading the two of them gave in Paris. After they had finished their reading, a woman raised her hand and said, “I’ve been listening to the two of you talk for the last hour, and I’m still confused: Which one of you is the Israeli? And which one the Palestinian?”

Related:
Article on Gaza Blues.
Gaza Blues review.
Keret and El-Youssef at Hay-on-Wye.

Thanks to Lauren B. for the NPR link.