The Human Spirit in the Language: Interview with Francisco Goldman

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I met Francisco Goldman in the summer of 2022, outside a cafe in the San Miguel neighborhood of Mexico City, some blocks from the apartment he shares with his wife, their daughter, and his wife’s niece (who lives under their care). Months before, I’d written a review about Goldman’s latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Monkey Boy. He was an author whose books I’d loved immoderately for years, an author whose best lines I cherished and could recite word for word, not misplacing even a dash or a comma. I decided to approach the review as if it were a conversation […]

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Books, Not Just the Characters, Are the Point: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s ‘Severina’

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In his introduction to Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Severina (Yale University Press, 112 pages), poet and translator Chris Andrews writes that for readers expecting the “baroque exuberance” of fellow Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, Rey Rosa’s fiction will come as a surprise. Not only does Rey Rosa eschew the colorful language of his predecessor for more restrained and economical prose, he allows dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations to regularly puncture his character’s worlds. In this respect, Andrews observes, the writer who Rey Rosa remains the most in debt to is Jorge Luis Borges. Reading Severina—only the fifth of Rey Rosa’s many works […]

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