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...
One nice thing about Ben’s work on the Real Pigeons series (Book 4 is out now) is that he and I now notice pigeons much more than we used to. There are lots of different pigeons in America, too – the little brown torcazas, with their feathers like scales,...
Crazy Rich Asians (2018) – A blow for representation this may be, but the central relationship is on the messed-up Jane Eyre/Rebecca model, where the heroine (Constance Wu) has to make all the adjustments to win over her rich, impassive boyfriend (Henry Golding) –...
I see my grandfather’s bones in frangipani tree branches: incautious in their instinct to share, they loll green tongues of leaf, litter the pavement with blossoms where they are trodden, turn banana-skin brown. I see them floating in saucers, stuck in lapels, a...
