Latin American Culture
A playful take on Latin American expeditions that reveals the contradictory problems therein.
We are street people. Nomadic by nature. We are the grandchildren of poor, adventurous strangers. Our living radicalizes their legacy.
The celebrated Argentine novelist on writing about writers, avoiding labels, and why critics shouldn’t write fiction.
The Argentine filmmaker on colonialism, recreating history, and Zama.
In the early 1960s, Eduardo Coutinho began shooting a film about the murder of Brazilian trade unionist João Pedro Teixeira.
New titles and reissues highlighted by Justin Taylor, Chelsea Hodson, Paul La Farge, Emmalea Russo, Alexandra Kleeman, Ted Dodson, Dan Sheehan, Kristen Radtke, Daniel Saldaña París, Marjorie Welish, Tobias Carroll, Jonathan Lee, Scott Esposito, and Lauren LeBlanc
The filmmaker speaks about his self-portrait as a young poet
A Chilean American poet maps the troubling parallels between his native land under Pinochet and the present-day US.
“I won’t open my palm for those wanting to dominate.”
“Questions that once belonged to the cinematic institution have been set upon the world of spectacle we live in today. These questions belong to all of us now.”
Staging historical justice in Hernán Ronsino’s Glaxo
“Breaking away from magical realism ended up creating another stereotype: that of a generation obsessed with mass media, new technologies, and disdainful of politics.”
The author’s first novel is set in Mexico City, but its themes of violence, grief, and solitude are truly global.
The nth volume of interviews by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist gathers fourteen conversations with surviving luminaries of an era of Mexican culture that in hindsight is nothing short of magnificent, despite its under-recognized or somewhat forgotten status abroad.
There are cities more present in the warp and weft of literature than others; that’s clear. The literary prestige of New York, Paris, or Mexico City is both undeniable and well-deserved: certain books, once read, transform forever the faces of those cities, superimposing a layer of fiction on their sidewalks and traffic signals.
“A writer worried about reception is cooking a dead book. A writer’s job is to produce the best possible book in absolute freedom, so the category ‘acceptable’ does not play in the process at all.”
For Tatiana Bilbao, an architectural project’s limitations are opportunities to experiment with new approaches. With artist Terence Gower she revisits recent ventures and Mexico’s architectural tradition.
The characters in Zambra’s stories and novels can’t help being impostors. Alarcón finds out why, on the occasion of the Chilean author’s recently published short-story collection, My Documents.
Shining a light on Latin American cinema.
