Ilan Stavans
By Ilan Stavans
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The Schmooze Is There a Jewish Literary Renaissance?
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His most recent books are the collection of essays “Singer’s Typewriter and Mine: Reflections on Jewish Culture” (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) and the graphic novel “El Iluminado” (Basic Books, with Steve Sheinkin). His blog posts are featured on The Arty…
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Culture Stopping To Think About the Roses
Traveler of the Century By Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $30 There was a time when Latin American writers felt compelled — maybe the word is “constrained” — to focus their work on a single topic: Latin America. Jorge Luis Borges sought to change this…
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Culture Living With Isaac Bashevis Singer
Who could live with Isaac Bashevis Singer? The sexual escapades of the most successful Yiddish writer in America — and the one whom most Yiddish literati loved to hate — were public knowledge, in large part because he himself built his reputation as a Casanova in his own fiction, where he was chased into the…
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Culture The Inquisition Is Now (and Forever)
God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World By Cullen Murphy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $27 There is something preposterous about Cullen Murphy’s journey through the history of the Inquisition. He analyzes it as if it were the root of all institutional evil in the modern world. Really. For years the…
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News Remembering a Master Denier — and a Dear Friend
[ ![][2]][2] As the world prepares to formulate its elegies and encomiums for the great Cándido López, it will no doubt damn him with faint praise as its leading Holocaust denier. In so doing, it will miss the intellectual revolution that Lopez was fomenting at the end of his life — the denial not merely…
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Culture Ariel Dorfman Sees Pitfalls in Exile’s Return
Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile By Ariel Dorfman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pages, $27 Ariel Dorfman has an ambivalent relationship with Chile: He is attracted to it and repelled by it in equal measure. As is clear from his handful of confessional narratives, the ambivalence makes him restless. But it also gives…
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News Trying To Make Sense of Eco’s Latest
The Prague Cemetery By Umberto Eco Translated by Richard Dixon Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 445 pages. $28 There?s no hiding it: Umberto Eco is a lousy novelist. Try as one may, it is difficult to make sense of his new novel, ?The Prague Cemetery.? As is often the case with him, the plot is built as…
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Culture Leaping Brazilian Leopards
Kafka’s Leopards By Moacyr Scliar. Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee Texas Tech, 96 pages, $26.95 An inveterate dreamer, Moacyr Scliar, the Brazilian-Jewish fabulist who died earlier this year, left behind a veritable treasure trove of enchanting literary artifacts. He was a friend of mine for decades, during which time he published altogether…
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