The Browning of America The Browning of America
In the past two decades, Richard Rodriguez has offered us a gamut of anecdotes, mostly about himself in action in an environment that is not always attuned to his own inner life. ...
May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
Lost in America Lost in America
"When I write, I bid farewell to myself," Jimmy Santiago Baca said in 1992. "I leave most of what I know behind and wander through the landscape of language." This is a memorable...
Feb 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
Trafficking in Verse Trafficking in Verse
Immigrants and traffickers are the subjects of a certain style of Mexican music.
Dec 20, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
What Spain Interrupted What Spain Interrupted
Antonio de Herrera, the royal chronicler of Philip II, writing about the conquest of the New World in Historia General, included these lines: The nations of New Spain preserved...
Sep 27, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
The Spanish Mien The Spanish Mien
V.S. Pritchett, whose essays are an invaluable companion, a sort of Dante's Virgil in the navigation of modern literature, once described Don Quixote as "the novel that killed a c...
Mar 1, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
Mr. Sammler’s Planet Mr. Sammler’s Planet
What ought to be read--and why--are questions that have a unique urgency in a multicultural milieu, where each group fights, legitimately, for its own space and voice. In the pas...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
In the American Grain In the American Grain
After his death in 1975 at the age of 70, Lionel Trilling underwent something of an eclipse.
Sep 7, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans