New Releases by Ilan Stavans

Based on a controversial opinion piece originally published in the New York Times, Reclaiming Travel is a provocative meditation on the meaning of travel from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison seek to understand why we travel and what has come to be missing from our contemporary understanding of travel. Engaging with canonical and contemporary texts, they explore the differences between travel and tourism, the relationship between travel and memory, the genre of travel writing, and the power of mapmaking, Stavans and Ellison call for a rethinking of the art of travel, which they define as a transformative quest that gives us deeper access to ourselves. Tourism, Stavans and Ellison argue, is inauthentic, choreographed, sterile, shallow, and rooted in colonialism. They critique theme parks and kitsch tourism, such as the shantytown hotels in South Africa where guests stay in shacks made of corrugated metal and cardboard yet have plenty of food, water and space. Tourists, they assert, are merely content with escapism, thrill seeking, or obsessively snapping photographs. Resisting simple moralizing, the authors also remind us that people don’t divide neatly into crude categories like travelers and tourists. They provoke us to reflect on the opportunities and perils in our own habits. In this powerful manifesto, Stavans and Ellison argue that travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression—a search for meaning not only in our own lives but also in the lives of others. It is not about the destination; rather, travel is about loss, disorientation, and discovering our place in the universe.

A cultural critic and an award-winning cartoonist subvert the conventional story of American history and focus on the vibrant and tireless workers, immigrants, homemakers and slaves who helped create and mold America as much as any celebrated white man.

The essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans and the analytic philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia share long-standing interests in the intersection of art and ideas. Here they take thirteen pieces of Latino art, each reproduced in color, as occasions for thematic discussions. Whether the work at the center of a particular conversation is a triptych created by the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Andres Serrano''s controversial Piss Christ, a mural by the graffiti artist BEAR_TCK, or Above All Things, a photograph by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Stavans and Gracia''s exchanges inevitably open out to literature, history, ethics, politics, religion, and visual culture more broadly. Autobiographical details pepper Stavans and Gracia''s conversations, as one or the other tells what he finds meaningful in a given work. Sparkling with insight, their exchanges allow the reader to eavesdrop on two celebrated intellectuals—worldly, erudite, and unafraid to disagree—as they reflect on the pleasures of seeing.

The story of longing and hope in the life of a Jewish boy and his family in 1930s Uruguay.

Although investigations of Hispanic popular culture were approached for decades as part of folklore studies, in recent years scholarly explorations—of lucha libre, telenovelas, comic strips, comedy, baseball, the novela rosa and the detective novel, sci-fi, even advertising—have multiplied. What has been lacking is an overarching canvas that offers context for these studies, focusing on the crucial, framing questions: What is Hispanic pop culture? How does it change over time and from region to region? What is the relationship between highbrow and popular culture in the Hispanic world? Does it make sense to approach the whole Hispanic world as homogenized when understanding Hispanic popular culture? What are the differences between nations, classes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and so on? And what distinguishes Hispanic popular culture in the United States? In ¡Muy Pop!, Ilan Stavans and Frederick Luis Aldama carry on a sustained, free-flowing, book-length conversation about these questions and more, concentrating on a wide range of pop manifestations and analyzing them at length. In addition to making Hispanic popular culture visible to the first-time reader, ¡Muy Pop! sheds new light on the making and consuming of Hispanic pop culture for academics, specialists, and mainstream critics.

Jews and Latinos have been unlikely partners through tumultuous times. This groundbreaking, eclectic book of readings, edited by Ilan Stavans, whom The Washington Post described as "one of our foremost cultural critics," offers a sideboard of the ups and downs of that partnership. It includes some seventy canonical authors, Jews and non-Jews alike, through whose diverse oeuvre-poetry, fiction, theater, personal and philosophical essays, correspondence, historical documents, and even kitchen recipes-the reader is able to navigate the shifting waters of history, from Spain in the tenth century to the Spanish-speaking Americas and the United States today. The Reader showcases the writings of such notable authors as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry W. Longfellow, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacobo Timerman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ruth Behar, and Ariel Dorfman to name only a few.

The United States of Mestizo is a powerful manifesto attesting to the fundamental changes the nation has undergone in the last half-century. Writer Ilan Stavans meditates on how the cross-fertilizing process that defined the Americas during the colonial period—the racial melding of Europeans and indigenous peoples—foretells the miscegenation that is the most salient profile of America today. If, as W.E.B. DuBois once argued, the twentieth century was defined by a color fracture at its core, Stavans believes the twenty-first will be shaped by a multi-color line that will make us all a sum of parts.

Tormented by bullies at their Jewish school in Mexico, Sammy Nurko asks his friend Ilan to help build and control, a small, Aztec version of the legendary Golem, then finds his own strength through the poetry of Nezahualcoyotl.

Ilan Stavans''s collection of essays on kitsch and high art in the Americas makes a return with thirteen new colorful conversations that deliver Stavans''s trademark wit and provocative analysis. "A Dream Act Deferred" discusses an issue that is at once and always topical in the dialogue of Hispanic popular culture: immigration. This essay generated a vociferous response when first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as the issue of immigration was contested in states like Arizona, and is included here as a new addition that adds a rich layer to Stavans''s vibrant discourse. Fitting in this reconfiguration of his analytical conversations on Hispanic popular culture is Stavans''s "Arrival: Notes from an Interloper," which recounts his origins as a social critic and provides the reader with interactive insight into the mind behind the matter. Once again delightfully humorous and perceptive, Stavans delivers an expanded collection that has the power to go even further beyond common assumptions and helps us understand Mexican popular culture and its counterparts in the United States.

Set in the desert Southwest, a graphic novel that is equal parts mystery and history

A cultural critic of extraordinary erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, and boundless curiosity, Ilan Stavans, an Ashkenazic Jew who grew up in Mexico, negotiates wildly varied topics as effortlessly and deftly as he manages the multiple perspectives of a dual national, religious, and ethnic identity. In Singer’s Typewriter and Mine, a follow-up to The Inveterate Dreamer (Nebraska, 2001), Stavans interweaves his own experience with that of other Jewish writers and thinkers, past and present, to explore modern Jewish culture across the boundaries of language and nation. Juxtaposing the personal and the analytical, these essays and conversations take up the oeuvres of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Mario Vargas Llosa, translation and God’s language, storytelling as midrash, anti-Semitism in Hispanic America, Yiddish and Sephardic literatures, the connection between humor and terror, impostors as cultural agents, the creators of the King James Bible, and the encounter between Jewish and Latino civilizations, to name but a few of Stavans’s topics here. Funny, engaging, and provocative, this collection continues Stavans’s project of opening new vistas in our cross-cultural understanding of language, literature, and life.

Cultural critic and acclaimed author Ilan Stavans captures the joys, nuances, and multiple dimensions of Latino culture within the context of the English language. Latino USA, like the history it so entertainingly relates, is a dazzling kaleidoscope of irreverence, wit, subversion, anarchy, politics, humanism, celebration, and serious and responsible history.

Inspired by a stirring e-mail exchange with his father, an award-winning essayist and cultural commentator decided to revisit his hometown, Mexico City, accompanied by a tour guide. "Return to Centro Histrico" makes it possible for readers to understand the intimate role that Jews have played in the development of Hispanic civilization.

This insightful compilation offers interdisciplinary views on soccer among Latinos. In contrast with its relative lack of popularity in the United States, elsewhere, professional soccer is a hugely popular sport whose key players rival movie stars in popularity and influence. For many Latinos, especially those who emigrated to the United States, it is the game of choice. While Latino players are still not a major force in U.S. soccer, Latino fans certainly are, comprising, by one estimate, 45 percent of Major League Soccer attendees. Seeking to explain the allure and the influence of soccer among Latinos, particularly those living in the United States, Fútbol offers a collection of essays that treat the game from a wide variety of perspectives. These essays—including reminiscences and impressionistic assessments—touch on topics as diverse as politics, religion, sociology, marketing, athletics, and gender relations as they attempt to contextualize soccer in the Latino community.

Mexican educator and thinker Jose Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans--a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, "Mestizaje" key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America--is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, "Mestizaje" suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos''s long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, "The Race Problem in Latin America," where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.

Natives of the Iberian Peninsula and the twenty countries of Latin America, as well as their kinsfolk who''ve immigrated to the United States and around the world, share a common quality or identity characterized as la hispanidad. Or do they? In this lively, provocative book, two distinguished intellectuals, a cultural critic and a historian, engage in a series of probing conversations in which they try to discern the nature of la hispanidad and debate whether any such shared identity binds the world''s nearly half billion people who are "Hispanic." Their conversations range from La Reconquista and Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who united the Spanish nation while expelling its remaining Moors and Jews, to the fervor for el fútbol (soccer) that has swept much of Latin America today. Along the way, they discuss a series of intriguing topics, including the complicated relationship between Latin America and the United States, Spanish language and the uses of Spanglish, complexities of race and ethnicity, nineteenth-century struggles for nationhood and twentieth-century identity politics, and popular culture from literary novels to telenovelas. Woven throughout are the authors'' own enlightening experiences of crossing borders and cultures in Mexico and Chile and the United States. Sure to provoke animated conversations among its readers, What is la hispanidad? makes a convincing case that "our hispanidad is rooted in a changing tradition, flexible enough to persist beyond boundaries and circumstances. Let us not fix it with a definition, but allow it instead to travel, always."

A dazzling and definitive compendium of the Latino literary tradition.

This long-awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of García Márquez''s life up to the publication of his classic 100 Years of Solitude. Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the life and works of the Nobel Laureate, father of magical realism, and bestselling author in the history of the Spanish language. As García Márquez''s impact endures on well into his ninth decade, Stavans''s keen insights constitute the definitive re-appraisal of the literary giant''s life and corpus. The later part of his life will be covered in a second book.

Is the Bible actually a love story between a deity and a people? And what does this love story have to do with the modern world? In With All Thine Heart distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans speaks to freelance writer Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible. Presented in an engaging, conversational format and touched with striking artwork, the textured dialogue between Stavans and Drache is meant to show how the Bible is a multidimensional text and one that, when considered over the course of history, still has the power to shape our world. The theme of love provides the connective tissue that binds this work. Addressing a wide range of topics, from biblical archaeology and fundamentalism to Hollywood movies, lexicography, and the act of praying, With All Thine Heart suggests that the Hebrew Bible is a novel worth decoding patiently, such as one does with classics like Don Quixote de la Mancha, In Search of Lost Time, and Anna Karenina. Similar to the protagonists in these tales, biblical characters, although not shaped with the artistic nuance of modern literature, allow for astonishing insight. This exploration of love through the pages of the Bible--organized chronologically from Genesis to Exodus and followed by insightful meditations on the Song of Songs and the Book of Job--is a delightful intellectual and spiritual treat . . . Shema Ysrael!

Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic''s Journey, he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others'' experiences. Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he''s also an outsider to that culture-something that''s sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics'' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America. Book jacket.

Essay and photographs re-embody Cesar Chavez, not as an icon, but as a man struggling for workers'' rights.

Part of the Jewish Encounter series Here is the stirring story of how Hebrew was rescued from the fate of a dead language to become the living tongue of a modern nation. Ilan Stavans’s quest begins with a dream featuring a beautiful woman speaking an unknown language. When the language turns out to be Hebrew, a friend diagnoses “language withdrawal,” and Stavans sets out in search of his own forgotten Hebrew as well as the man who helped revive the language at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The search for Ben-Yehuda, who raised his eldest son in linguistic isolation–not even allowing him to hear the songs of birds–so that he would be “the first Hebrew-speaking child,” becomes a journey full of paradox. It was Orthodox anti-Zionists who had Ben-Yehuda arrested for sedition, and, although Ben-Yehuda was devoted to Jewish life in Palestine, it was in Manhattan that he worked on his great dictionary of the Hebrew language. The resurrection of Hebrew raises urgent questions about the role language plays in Jewish survival, questions that lead Stavans not merely into the roots of modern Hebrew but into the origins of Israel itself. All the tensions between the Diaspora and the idea of a promised land pulse beneath the surface of Stavans’s story, which is a fascinating biography as well as a moving personal journey.

In the face of social inequalities, sometimes strength for mobilization can be found through laughter. It is this ethos that Ilan Stavans employs in this politically minded graphic novel. Weaving humor with social commentary, Stavans tells a tale of a Latino man taking Los Angeles'' mayoral office by storm — and refusing to stop there. Illustrated throughout by Roberto Weil, the story follows the life and political development of Mr. Spic — Samuel Patricio Inocencio Cárdenas — as he upends the political machine by owning up to and embracing his rough-and-tumble past, refusing to bend to corporate pressures, and using his influence to promote pacifism and tolerance. Progressive politics has always moved forward with the help of dedicated, singular individuals, and Mr. Spic — light-hearted as his story may be — hilariously exemplifies that model.

The One-Handed Pianist was published to acclaim in the early 1990’s, with the two-part Spanish edition winning the Latino Literature Prize in 1989 and the Gamma Literature Prize in 1992. Its tales look at what it means to be Jewish in the Hispanic world—a world in which spirituality is often exercised outside the realm of orthodoxy. Stavans constructs fables that raise questions about ethnicity and community; even Stavans’ person raises questions about ethnicity and community: what does it mean that a Jew of Eastern European lineage can call himself Latino and speak for that group?

Surprising readers again and again, cultural critic Ilan Stavans creates a dialogue with Vernica Albin to explore love in its many variations.

Hailed as one of the most important Hispanic writers of his generation, Ilan Stavans is a celebrated storyteller whose work has been translated into a dozen languages and has garnered numerous international awards. The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories contains three masterful gems. The novella, “Morirse está en hebreo,” is a thought-provoking meditation on continuity and tradition among Mexican Jews; “Xerox Man” is an intriguing story about a book thief with a bizarre theological obsession; and the title story, “The Disappearance,” is the resonant tale of a Belgian actor who kidnaps himself in an attempt to respond to neo-Nazi groups. Together, these three pieces offer an unforeseen vista of Jewish-Hispanic relations and confirm Stavans’ reputation as an original literary voice.