At the start of Levrero’s novel The City his protagonist leaves the house to buy groceries and, lost in the rain, flags down a truck. The next two chapters carry him further and further away from his original intention. (The first two chapters are here.) 3. When...
This is my translation of the first two chapters of Mario Levrero’s novel The City. The protagonist lives in a perverse universe where nothing he does produces the outcome he expects and his choices keep leading him further and further from home. By his own...
En la historia de cada colonia, después de la independencia había una crisis adolescente de identidad. Los ciudadanos del nuevo país elegían entre dos opciones: emular la modernidad de los amos antiguos o buscar algo propio de las tierras colonizadas. La ansiedad...
Juan Rulfo is one of those authors famous for only a couple of books – his reputation rests on the short story collection El llano en llamas and the novel Pedro Páramo, both published in a burst of creativity in the 1950s. For an author whose terse style evokes a...
The poetry of Gabriela Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize in 1945, is very concrete, and generally it’s yoked to the Chilean landscape. Often her protagonists are women: on solitary journeys that might be a pilgrimage or an attempt at flight; stuck in landscapes...
Julio Ramón Ribeyro was a Peruvian author best known for his short stories; his work is enjoying a surge of attention in Peru on the 90th anniversary of his birth. Shopping in Lima I was torn between his collected stories, a formidable brick of a book, and his Prosas...
