Dreamers Rise

A quick hopscotch from Sonny Rollins to Lope de Vega and back again. When I think of Sonny Rollins the first thing that comes to mind isn...

Two recent publishing events revisit the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary "Boom" of the 1960s, in particular hi...

In the 1980s, with his international reputation secured, Gabriel García Márquez agreed to write a series of brief syndicated essays that app...

For a commonplace book, notes on hotel rooms and the solitary travelers who visit them, sometimes only in the mind. Image: Joseph Cornell, U...

Cortázar's short story "Carta a una señorita en París" (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris) is narrated by a man who has a peculi...

City Lights Books has announced the death of its co-founder, the writer, bookseller, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after an asto...

I wish I were a cassowary Out on the plains of Timbuctoo. I'd kill and eat a missionary-- Head, arms, legs, and hymn-book too. ...

Today, entirely by accident, I learned of the existence of this bundle of eight chapbooks published in 2017 by the Center for Humanities at ...

Julio Cortázar: Everybody knows that the Earth is separated from other heavenly bodies by a variable number of light-years. What few know (i...

An incident that Julio Cortázar (a noted admirer of Verne) would no doubt have appreciated, as related by Alejandro Zambla: I remember how a...

Feliz día de las mangostas . None of us recalls the text of the law that obliges us to collect the dead leaves, but we are convinced that i...

Every novel is philosophical, in that it consciously or (more usually) unconsciously embodies a theory of being. We know that this is true...

I'm in the early stages of a long slow re-read of Cortázar's Hopscotch, and this time I'm making a point of annotating some of ...

The translator Gregory Rabassa has died, according to a notice from the Associated Press. Rabassa was a professor for many years at Quee...

Clases de literatura: Berkeley, 1980, published in 2013, presents the transcription of a series of seminars that Julio Cortázar conducted (...

Aurora Bernárdez, the first wife and literary executor of Julio Cortázar, has died in Paris. Though the couple divorced in the 1960s, after ...

"The circumstances of my birth weren't extraordinary at all but they were a bit colorful, because it was a birth that took place in...

Translated, with permission, from Tororo's French original at A Nice Slice of Tororo Shiru . The year 2014 has been decreed the año Co...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Julio Cortázar (in the suburbs of Brussels, August 26th, 1914, just days into the Ge...

Call it an urban legend or what you will: here's a twice-told tale that only acquired its full impact years after the events it purports...