As far as literary journal subscriptions go, I only maintain three. I’m one of those writers, and for my sins I mostly miss the great early pieces of writers I come to love years later. This is especially true of new Latina/o writers, who I think most people miss for various reasons, not least of…
It must have been April when I looked at my calendar and decided that my summer was going to be an absolute wash. This month alone, there’s the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Finals, the French Open, and the World Cup happening almost simultaneously. And as avid sports fan, I knew June was going to…
By now it seems everyone’s read Junot Diaz’s MFA vs POC blog on the New Yorker website. Even my freshmen at Cornell these days say to me, “Dan, was it really like that?” Usually I just shrug in response. I was a notorious recluse in my MFA. I had a girlfriend—now fiancé—in New York City who I visited every…
It took every fiber of me not to rattle off a quick ditty about Gabo the night after he passed. I tried, of course, but then where do you stop? Fifteen thousand words? Twenty? In this digital age you’re late even if only by a day, which seemed appropriate actually, because I’m a Texican—A Texas…
My newest literary kick is immersing myself in literature from Latin America that hasn’t been translated to English yet. Reading outside of the American canon, you learn new tricks and new ways of cutting familiar narratives—but if you’re lucky you learn a new kind of reading altogether.
A student of mine asked the other day if Latinos still wrote. He was dead serious. And by the reddening at the tops of his ears I could tell it was a completely sincere question, a bold one with all of the shame that fills the liminal space between a bold question and the professor’s…
Every once in awhile a book comes across my desk that I read and can’t believe hasn’t blown up bigger already. Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen is the thing I’m big on right now, a novel about the dangers of being a girl in contemporary Narco Mexico, narrated in first-person by our protagonist, Ladydi…
I was 21 years old when I first read José Emilio Pacheco, one of Mexico’s premier literary writers, who died earlier this month. I found him by being nosy, browsing through my friend’s bookshelves while he was having sex with his girlfriend in her father’s Land Rover, somewhere out on top of a hill. She…
When asked whether he saw himself as a Peruvian writer or an American writer in the New York Times last year, following the publication of his newest novel At Night We Walk in Circles, Daniel Alarcón replied, “Why should I have to choose?” I remember reading that passage in the second paragraph, rereading it, and then rereading it again…
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