Interview in Electric Literature

                    I was interviewed recently by book critic and educator Heather Scott Partington for Electric Literature. Here are a few extracts: “Magical things happen, but [Damnificados] isn’t Harry Potter. You can’t wave a wand and make poverty disappear.” “I discovered how creative and resourceful the poor…

RIP Gregory Rabassa, translator of Márquez, Amado, Vargas Llosa

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez) Those are not the words of Gabriel García Márquez. They’re the words of Gregory Rabassa, his translator,…

New Books with a Social Justice Theme, Summer 2016

LAW AND DISORDER Obama’s Guantánamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison edited by Jonathan Hafetz (NYU Press) Illegal rendition, torture, indefinite incarceration without charge or trial. Narratives delivered by the lawyers of Guantánamo inmates remind us that this crime against humanity endures. Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History by Arthur J. Ray…

Scrapper – by Matt Bell

  Matt Bell’s Scrapper is a requiem for a defunct city. The urban wreckage of Detroit is seen vividly through the eyes of the antihero, Kelly. Kelly is a scrapper, someone who trawls through dilapidated buildings looking for re-sellable metals – steel pipes, iron, copper wiring. Early in the novel, Kelly is excavating a gutted…

Ahmed Naji, Egyptian Novelist, Imprisoned in Egypt for “violating public modesty”

Reader gets low blood pressure; writer goes to jail. A tale of the absurd, but also a tragedy. I spent two years living in Egypt in the 1990s. I loved the country: its people, its food, its literature, its history. I made great friends and learned a lot. Alas, the government’s grip on the nation’s…