Saturnin wants his master to be an adventurer, but he doesn’t merely plan or dream: He acts on his fantasies, creating situations that force his master out of his banal existence and into the unexpected.
The Propagandist – Cécile Desprairies
Desprairies challenges the reader to inhabit a morally fraught protagonist. Why would someone collaborate with Nazis, the novel asks. Who would do such a thing?
Years and Years – Hwang Jungeun
Sejin and Yeongjin seem to be aware of the pitfalls of their mother’s refusal to speak of her past . . . but they ultimately do the same themselves. The three women take silence as a given, assuming that speaking would only lead to more harm.
GALÁXIAS takes not only São Paulo, but the entire universe in its orbit.
ESTA BOCA ES MÍA – Lupita Limón Corrales
Communities are made of relationships not only between people but between people and places—between us and our homes, the plants that grow on the sidewalk, the basements we gather in to chat and strategize.
The Burning Plain – Juan Rulfo
The real perpetrator of violence in THE BURNING PLAIN is [the] cycle of poverty and the systems that engender it. The characters in these stories are so vulnerable that their existence rests on an edge, and the smallest upheaval or change becomes magnified and topples them completely.
In [Juan Emar’s] work . . . we can discover the possibilities of a literature that both resists and reconciles the European tradition with the rest of the world. It is in writers like Emar that we can find what Goethe called a Weltliteratur—a World Literature–and a Latin American tradition which . . . has vigorously and defiantly come back to life.
My grandmother’s house, which is the house in WOODWORM, is charged with strange energy. Nobody wants to sleep there alone, and it is common to have this feeling of being accompanied even if you don’t see or hear anyone.
Phantom Pain Wings – Kim Hyesoon
If loss is a small hammer veining an otherwise intact shell, then grief is what shatters that shell into pieces in Kim Hyesoon’s complex collection PHANTOM PAIN WINGS.
Julia Kornberg & Jack Rockwell
The West might want us to think of ourselves as different and peripheral . . . they might urge us to portray images that fulfill their prejudices about Argentina, [but] we can have a more universalist approach and write, essentially, about whatever we want, and it will still be Argentine literature.