New Releases by Ilan Stavans

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

For almost twenty years, Ilan StavansÑdescribed by the Washington Post as "Latin AmericaÕs liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast"Ñhas interviewed path-breaking intellectuals and artists in a wide range of media. As host of the critically acclaimed PBS series La Plaza, he interviews guests on pressing issues that affect the Western Hemisphere today, asking hard-hitting questions on immigration, religion, bilingualism, race, and democracy. This book collects for the first time in one volume StavansÕs most provocative and enlightening interviews with Hispanics from both sides of the Rio Grande. Spontaneous and surprising, these conversations reflect Latino life in the United States in all its facets. Among the more than two dozen selections, Edward James Olmos talks about Hispanics in Hollywood; John Leguizamo describes how he shapes a stage show; author Richard Rodriguez reflects on his gang background; Esmeralda Santiago takes on the Puerto Rican stereotype; and Piri Thomas shares thoughts on the writing of Down These Mean Streets. "A conversation is a tango," writes Stavans, "for it takes two to dance it." Conversations with Ilan Stavans invites readers to catch the rhythm and enjoy these unique meetings of minds.

In 13 essays, Stavans (Latin American and Latino culture, Amherst College, Massachusetts) explores the history of lexicography across many languages, sharing strange meaning inconsistencies, unusual origins, and extraordinary anecdotes. He does not provide an index. Annotation 2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America wasanointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. Spanish, present on this continent since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. The nation''s unofficial second language, it is highly visible on several 24-hour TV networks and on more than 200 radio stations across the country. But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.

Trata de questões como linguagem e identidade, cultura e globalização. Explora o tema da cultura hispano-americana e o idioma "spanglish", para demonstrar como a população latin tornou-se um influência na literatura, artes, música e política dos Estados Unidos.

Pairs riddles in English and Spanish with a set of cards for the Mexican board game known as "Loterâia" designed by a contemporary Mexican American artist.

Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and English-at various points in Ilan Stavans''s life, each of these has been his primary language. In this rich memoir, the linguistic chameleon outlines his remarkable cultural heritage from his birth in politically fragile Mexico, through his years as a student activist and young Zionist in Israel, to his present career as a noted and controversial academic and writer. Along the way, Stavans introduces readers to some of the remarkable members of his family-his brother, a musical wunderkind; his father, a Mexican soap opera star; his grandmother, who arrived in Mexico from Eastern Europe in 1929 and wrote her own autobiography. Masterfully weaving personal reminiscences with a provocative investigation into language acquisition and cultural code switching, On Borrowed Words is a compelling exploration of Stavans''s search for his place in the world.

Producto de muchos años de lectura, apreciación y asimilación del arte hispánico, este excelente volumen reúne las disquisiciones del autor en torno a la idiosincracia latina dentro del ámbito anglosajón, particularmente el estadounidense, y sus tentáculos a lo largo y ancho de todas las Américas. La intensa interacción entre las culturas sajona y latina, cuyo principal escenario-pero no el único-es el río Grande, proporciona material abundante para analizar las conductas de los diversos grupos étnicos que conviven cotidianamente en los Estados Unidos. Las relaciones inequitativas de poder que por lo general producen los asiáticos y latinos son el tema de numerosas obras literarias y fílmicas a las que el autor recurre para tocar los distintos ángulos del tema central. Esta obra memorable es el resultado de una vida compartida en dos ámbitos culturales más que de un trabajo premeditado y regular de investigación, Stavans, a quien los medios de comunicación norteamericanos han descrito como "un Alexis de Tocqueville moderno" y "un ensayista de la más fina calidad intelectual en la línea de Edmund Wilson y Octavio Paz". Ilán Stavans nació en México, en 1961. Cursó estudios de posgrado en la Universidad de Columbia, y ahora tiene la cátedra Lewis-Sebring de cultura latina y latinoamericana en Amherst College. Colabora con artículos y reseñas en diversas publiciones periódicas estadounidenses, como The Washington Post, The New York Times y The Nation, entre muchas otras. En 1992 obtuvo el Premio Latino de Literatura; en 1994 fue nominado para el National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing; y en 1998 obtuvo la beca Guggenheim. Su vasta obra, que incluye las colecciones de ensayo Art and Anger y The Riddle of Cantinflas, así como la autobiografía On Borrowed Words, ha sido traducida a media docena de lenguas.

Not only do "modern" Jewish languages like Yiddish and Hebrew have their own Jewish writers, but every major Western tongue?from German and Russian to English and Portuguese?does as well. These writers are often at the crossroad between the two traditions: their Jewish one and their own national one. Is there such a thing as a modern Jewish literary tradition, one navigating across linguistic and national lines? If so, how should one define it? Ilan Stavans is uniquely qualified to answer these questions and to comment on the power and challenges of cultural margins and literary crossings. He has been at the forefront of an appreciation of the Jewish literary tradition that is less asphyxiating, more global. His reflections on Jewish Latin America have won him the nickname "pathfinder." This incomparable volume showcases Stavans's most insightful and provocative?and at times controversial?observations on transnational Jewish culture and literature. Stavans explores the problems and prospects of representing Jewish experiences through such media as Holocaust memoirs and Jewish museums; astutely comments on well-known intellectual figures, including Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Primo Levi, Harold Bloom, and Walter Benjamin; engages in memorable conversations with Norman Manea, Joseph Brodsky, and Ariel Dorfman; and offers compelling glimpses of revelatory moments in his own life.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Producto de muchos aos de lectura, apreciacin y asimilacin del arte hispnico, este excelente volumen rene las disquisiciones del autor en torno a la idiosincrasia latina en el mbito anglosajn, particularmente estadunidense, y sus tentculos a lo largo y ancho de todas las Amricas. Stavans incluye una cronologa de hechos histricos y de creacin de obras importantes de arte y la literatura latinas al norte del ro Bravo, adems, de una bibliografa y una filmografa completas sobre el tema.

Presentation of the author''s psychoanalytic beliefs and experiences inchild psychoanalytic therapy.

This study of of the short fiction by Julio Cortazar - ten collections in all - is considered here as a part of the enormous body of Latin American literature which began to be discovered in this country in the 1960s. By showing the reader Cortazar's relation to other writers in this genre Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Borges, and others, the author provides a platform for critical exploration into Cortazar's work.

The crossroads where politics and the imagination meet--from the shaping of Latin America's collective identity to Columbus's afterlife.

"With the Columbian quincentennial have come a spate of books devoted to one or another aspect of the Italian mariner and his famous 1492 voyage. None, however, has taken the bold, creative approach of this new volume: to explore Columbus''s "fifth voyage," the one depicted in hundreds of literary musings by writers worldwide over the past half-millennium." "Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage is Ilan Stavans''s stunning contribution to the literature on Columbus. "My purpose," says Stavans, "is to revisit, to investigate, to play with the asymmetrical geometries of the admiral''s literary adventures in the human imagination." Arguing that writers have portrayed Columbus in three ways - as prophet or messiah, as ambitious goldseeker, and as conventional, unremarkable man - Stavans examines a veritable treasure trove of poems, novels, short stories, dramas, and other works on Columbus." "Organizing his material into two main parts, Stavans first takes up "Mapmaking," inspecting the two opposing views of the celebration of the quincentennial; discussing the most notable biographies of Columbus, including those by Washington Irving and Samuel Eliot Morison; and providing the necessary biographical data on Columbus''s life and achievements. Then, in "The Literary Character," Stavans takes up the geographic and historical development of Columbus as a narrative figure in literature, devoting a chapter to each of the three literary views of the admiral - portrayals by writers as diverse as Walt Whitman, Alejo Carpentier, James Fenimore Cooper, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ruben Dario, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, Philip Freneau, Stephen Marlowe, and scores of others." "In a brilliantly imaginative conclusion, Stavans attempts to foresee what the future might bring. "My goal," he says, "is to describe some of the unwritten books on the mariner, the apocryphal titles that are likely to be published in the next 100 years."" "A hallmark testament to the potential of the human imagination, Imagining Columbus will be hailed by scholars, students, and general audiences."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

En esta obra Il n Stavans aborda, de manera innovadora, la antiqu sima discusi n de la intertextualidad de las obras literarias. Usando ejemplos correctos, Stavans nos muestra que todo libro es una reinterpretaci n de otros. de este modo, una creaci n escrita se convierte en un peque o universo donde convive una multiplicidad de mundos narrados.

A bilingual collection of poems, stories, and other writings which celebrates diversity among Latinos.