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Every year BOMB puts together a special “Americas Issue” focusing on art and literature from a different part of the Americas. This tends to mean South America, but you never know, maybe Canada will be—or was?—the focus at some point in time. Regardless, this is always one of my favorite issues of the year from this esteemed magazine that’s been around since 1981, and this year’s focus on Colombia and Venezuela keeps that tradition going.
Some of the highlights:
- Antonio Ungar (whose “My Grandrather’s Disintegration” is included in the “First Proof” supplement as translated by Katherine Silver) has an interview with Evelio Rosero, author of The Armies, which won this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize ;
- Conversation between Sergio Fajardo and Giancarlo Mazzanti about Medellin’s urban transformation;
- Discussion between Venezuela’s Ana Teresa Torres and Carmen Boullosa; and
- Interview with Juan Gabriel Vasquez (The Informers) conducted by Silvana Paternostro.
The “First Proof” literary supplement also has pieces by Luis Enrique Belmonte, Carolina Lozada, Victor Manuel Gaviria, Yolanda Pantin, Federico Vegas, Hector Abad Faciolince, Igor Barreto, and Luis Molina-Pantin. (You have to buy the actual magazine to get access to these pieces . . .)
I don’t know as much about contemporary Venezuelan literature, but Colombia is pretty hot these days with both Vasquez’s The Informers and Rosero’s The Armies getting a lot of good attention. Not to mention Santiago Gamboa . . .
Reviewed by Jeremy Osner
“The small stone plaza was floating in the midday heat. The Christ of Elqui, kneeling on the ground, his gaze thrown back on high, the part in his hair dark under the Atacaman sun—he felt himself falling into an ecstasy.. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
