Interviews Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s debut novel, The Fallen—a withering portrait of a Cuban family with conflicting visions of their country and their roles within it—was published in June 2020 and has helped establish Álvarez as one of the leading writers of Cuba’s new generation. The book’s schisms reflect deeper rifts within the country today. Armando, a diehard Marxist, clings to his idea of the sanctity of the Cuban Revolution, even as he becomes the pawn of a corrupt bureaucracy. Meanwhile, his son, Diego, disillusioned and distraught, chafes under the demands of enforced military duty. Mariana, the mother, is prone to mysterious dizzy spells and is slowly losing her grip on reality; while their daughter, Maria, finds herself entangled in a web of betrayals in the black market of the island’s tourist economy. Revolutionary idealism has run up against the harsh realities of modern life. The deprivations of the “special period” of the 1990s, in fact, still loom over the present. “Now, thinking back, all we can remember is a cycle of hunger, a state of siege in which there was nothing,” Mariana recalls, “an emptiness in every plate, an emptiness in the shops, an emptiness in the freezer compartment of the fridge, an emptiness in the fields and in the factories, and an emptiness, larger than all the rest, in our hearts and in our stomachs.” This past December, Álvarez came under fire from Cuban authorities for his support of the... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2021-03-29 21:52:25 UTC ]
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In 2013, I corresponded with David Ferry by phone to conduct a wide-ranging interview on his poetry, translations, and literary life. He had just won the National Book Award for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations and was still at work on Virgil’s Aeneid which he published in 2018. Today,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-05 09:48:44 UTC ]
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An awesome daily roundup of the most interesting bookish links from around the web. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-03-01 11:30:56 UTC ]
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Three Muslim women cast off domestic duties and travel into the Scottish highlands. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-25 18:58:35 UTC ]
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Three Muslim women cast off domestic duties and travel into the Scottish highlands. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-25 18:58:35 UTC ]
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Sally Rooney’s takeover of the world continues apace today with the announcement that the Irish literary phenom’s debut novel Conversations With Friends will be adapted into a twelve-part series for the BBC. Like the upcoming BBC/Hulu adaptation of Rooney’s 2019 juggernaut Normal People, which... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-25 18:39:10 UTC ]
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BBC Three is adapting Sally Rooney’s 2017 debut novel, Conversations with Friends, into twelve half an hour episodes directed by Oscar-nominated Irish film director Lenny Abrahamson. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-02-24 15:37:51 UTC ]
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Andersen Press is publishing Cane Warriors by Alex Wheatle, a "visceral" historical novel about the real-life slave uprising against British plantation owners in Jamaica in 1760 known as Tacky’s War. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-02-21 07:47:08 UTC ]
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“The Lost Girls” is a group biography of love and lust among the wartime literati. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-19 19:00:00 UTC ]
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“The Lost Girls” is a group biography of love and lust among the wartime literati. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-02-19 07:00:00 UTC ]
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When you’re writing a memoir, you find that you’re obliged to confront your own ideas about the nature of memory. In Gore Vidal’s own splendid memoir Palimpsest, he suggests that when we remember an event, we don’t remember it as it actually happened, but rather that we remember our memory of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-11 09:48:31 UTC ]
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Subscribe on iTunes | Spotify | SoundCloud | LARB Editor-in-Chief Tom Lutz is joined by author and USC Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Sympathizer, at a recent LARB Luminary Dinner. Viet begins by talking about about his family’s... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-01-27 20:01:38 UTC ]
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Frank Cruz always told other people's stories. Now, he tells all in his memoir about his days as a reporter, Telemundo co-founder and everything in between. He carved paths for others along the way. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-01-18 13:48:12 UTC ]
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I KEEP FOLDING DOWN the corners of pages in this latest anthology from WriteGirl. It’s that kind of book, contains multitudes, it does — 180 young writers represented, and a range of genres, too: poetry, prose, drama, song — and in between selections, tips to keep a writer of any age on task:... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-01-16 18:00:49 UTC ]
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STACEYANN CHIN MADE a name for herself performing poetry on Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam, but her work extends beyond her electrifying spoken-word performances. She is a civil rights activist and teacher, published a critically acclaimed memoir in 2009 called The Other Side of Paradise,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-12-29 18:00:18 UTC ]
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She was also a publisher and an author whose memoir affirmed that her father, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, had popularized the Serenity Prayer. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-12-13 22:52:39 UTC ]
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Lion TV have acquired the option to develop BBC Middle East editor Raffi Berg's debut Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad's Fake Diving Resort as a television documentary. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-29 01:06:38 UTC ]
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“UNLIKE MOST JEWISH BOYS from New Jersey, I have a Jamaican accent,” writes Ross Kenneth Urken in Another Mother, his memoir in which he goes in search of both his recollections of the Jamaican nanny who raised him and all of the things he never knew about her before she died. He writes,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-11-24 20:00:33 UTC ]
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PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH for the first time by Verso Books, Will and Testament is the latest novel from Vigdis Hjorth, one of Norway’s leading writers. Told from the perspective of Bergljot, a theater critic estranged from her parents and siblings, the narrative is centered around the inheritance of... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-11-21 20:00:35 UTC ]
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