Eltit’s novels are radical projects that dispute the public space, the national interpretation and the role of genres under authoritarian conditions. 

“I have never believed and have no faith in the intentions of a man who wants to make life better for all men. I think this just leads to concentration camps and Stalinist purges, the Inquisition and all of that horror. I believe that man is a species one should be very suspicious of.”

“Like all novelists, I like reality, and I also like to betray reality by correcting its flaws and ultimately reinventing it.”

Gioconda Belli is one of Nicaragua’s major political and intellectual voices.

“I engage in several operations with stereotypes, by reconstructing the historical evolution of a representational figure, and its insertion or revival as colonial discourse. What interests me is the stereotype as a symbolic mode.”

For Gerzso, although reason intervenes in the creative process, intuition has the last word, for it synthesizes the known and the felt.

“I’m not interested in some kind of monolithic narrative. That’s why I’m fascinated by scents and other ephemeral things; I’m giving people triggers that activate memories and contexts, and they create their own narratives.”

Pedro Meyer is one of the first photographers to swim from the shores of analogue photography to those of the digital world.

In Brazil, Marisa Monte is an overwhelmingly popular singer, famous for being lucky enough to do exactly as she pleases. 

In June of 1999, my band was scheduled to open for Jesús Alemañy’s group Cubanismo, at Prospect Park’s “Celebrate Brooklyn!” series. Needless to say, like most New York bandleaders, I don’t have an all-the-time working band. 

What happens to the collective psyche of a people when the parameters of their country and culture are forcibly shifted?

It seems a tough time to make work about cultural identity, with all the big “identity politics” exhibitions—Masculine Masquerade, Black Male, Mistaken Identities—being studied now as historical perspectives.

During the ’90s, a decisive change in Mexican photography occurred: nationalist references, which for so long had identified the exterior of Mexico, were dramatically abandoned by a new generation of photographers.

Colombian artist María Teresa Hinicapié’s performance work is a spiritual quest that binds art and ritual.

Anyone living in Mexico City knows that policemen not only epitomize official corruption, but are also noted actors and emitters of unsurpassable oxymorons and redundancies. 

If I were a character in a play, the lack of true privacy would arouse in me feelings of profound mistrust, disquiet, suspicion.

It would be like making love in reverse. In that universe, passions would be ruled by composure, an irrepressible desire for pain and the abomination of pleasure.

For years I’ve been trying to get out from under all the shit that’s been dumped on me. 

During the course of long interviews, there always comes a moment of responding to the question of whether one lives from what one writes. 

At the river port there were six freight cars carrying sacks of salt, at a hundred rubles per car for unloading them. If you worked by yourself, the hundred rubles were all yours; if you split the work, you got fifty.

My friend Liliana Heer managed to make a book materialize from the forbidden library. It’s impossible to know where the library is, or how—and when—Liliana managed such an unlikely feat.

This First Proof contains the poems “Sea of Multiplications,” “Hotel King III,” and “In the Yugo Bar, Cipango.”