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Alicia Borinsky argues that the contemporary Latin American novel
does not just ingeniously dismantle the referential claims of the
more traditional novel; it offers a postmodern version of the
lessons taught by fiction. Latin American fiction, perhaps the most
inventive literature of recent decades, seems marked by its
self-reflexivity, by its playful relationship to history and the
everyday, and by its concerns with the ways in which language
works. But is it, Borinsky asks, really a literature whose primary
goal is to raise metafictional questions about writing and reading?
While the effects of this literature include dismantling the
illusions of realism, naturalism, and historicism, the haunting and
disturbing energy of its major works lies in their capacity of
invoke a region beyond literature through literature. Theoretical
Fables progresses by way of close readings of the works of eight
canonical-and not quite canonical-Latin American Authors. Borinsky
argues that the Latin American "theoretical fable" has its origins
in the work of the early twentieth-century Argentinean writer
Macedonio Fernandez. In this light she studies the works of Jorge
Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso,
Adolfo Bioy Cesares, Manuel Puig, and Maria Luisa Bombal.
In these short, bilingual stories set in Buenos Aires (with each
piece appearing in Spanish and English on facing pages), Alicia
Borinsky provides unique glimpses into the lives of the city's
inhabitants: its businessmen and tango dancers, politicians and
torturers, triumphant divas and discarded children--a gallery of
characters from a broad spectrum of contemporary Argentine society.
She portrays a world of violence, corruption, love, and betrayal.
The brevity of the pieces suggests a breathlessness and ephemeral
quality, the fast-paced rhythm of the present. Yet within these
small moments flicker the larger forces that shape ordinary lives.
Civil wars are fought, shady deals are made, unwanted children are
born. And in Borinsky's ironic but life-affirming prose, human
foibles are exposed. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by
the Public Library Association
In Lost Cities Go to Paradise, poetry breaks into song and poetic
prose becomes lively storytelling as Alicia Borinsky raises
intimate questions about the fragility of contemporary life.
Composed of many layered scenes, unforgettable characters,
snapshots, and vignettes, this collection of quick-witted poems and
short fiction mixes deceit and conceit with moments of tenderness
and the elusive nature of humanity, asking if identity is more than
a festival of masks and self-invention. At the center of Borinsky's
work are the cities, which are a masquerade of disaster and
spectacle that moves through space and time. Within these cities
reside a woman who hides her face so that she may be better seen,
cheating lovers who betray only to end up entwined in a tango, and
immigrants who borrow one another's accents. Filled with energy and
irreverence, Lost Cities Go to Paradise captures the indignities
and excitement of living among others in a society and discovering
what is valued-and all that is not.
Winner of the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited
Collection Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of
ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates
contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural
and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges
and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet,
and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin
word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,”
as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how
translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the
literary production of cities in their greater cultural context,
and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a
city's past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking
about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of
the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of
translation. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed
worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The sports issue of Point of Contact features conversations,
essays, and artwork by and about coach Jim Boeheim, writers Tim
Green and Mary Karr, Chief Oren Lyons and Lacrosse coach Roy
Simmons, Jr., film maker Owen Shapiro, and novelist and teacher Tom
Friedmann. Pedro Cuperman writes in the introduction that the
topics featured go beyond the commercialism and drug abuse in the
sports industry. Incorporating everything from an essay on
Quidditch and the obsession of English elite boarding schools with
physical education to a conversation about Lacrosse between Chief
Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation and Roy Simmons, Jr., the work in
this issue explores old topics from the "exuberance of the body" to
"sports as a metaphor for spiritual endurance."
"Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer" takes place in the new "free
market" era of personal choices and relations: a chaotic, sometimes
hopeful, often comic world that has supplanted the old order of
political terror and clearly demarcated ideological divides. The
novel's vaudeville qualities, with characters shuffling on and off
the page in rapid succession, are complemented by its exhilarating
air of parody. "Dreams" draws ingeniously upon the sentimentality
and ephemera of popular culture--quoting radio and TV shows, song
lyrics, newspaper items, and bits of gossip-- while also offering a
sterner, more nuanced view of public and private relations. It is
in large measure this mix of elements--"popular" and "high"
culture, sentimentality and political understanding, vaudeville and
arch satire--that makes "Dreams" an exemplary postmodern novel.
Winner of the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited
Collection Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of
ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates
contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural
and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges
and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet,
and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin
word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,”
as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how
translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the
literary production of cities in their greater cultural context,
and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a
city's past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking
about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of
the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of
translation. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed
worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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