Literal Magazine

Essay

Pitol Is and Is Not Mexican: About El mago de Viena

Tanya Huntington

Up until recently Sergio Pitol (Puebla, 1933) was one of the best-kept secrets in Mexican literature. However, the recent announcement that he has been awarded the Premio Cervantes—perhaps the most…

Essay

How American Is It? Three Mexican Writers Look North

Marteen Van Delden

Sometimes as model, more often as menace, the United States looms large in the Mexican literary imagination. Mexican writers who look north of the border have responded with a mixture…

Essay

Fin

Álvaro Enrigue

Lo difícil es la primera hora: en parte porque hay que despertarse temprano en sábado para sacar las cosas a la calle y en parte porque nunca es deseable exponer…

Essay

En 1967 se publica la antología Aquí once cubanos cuentan (México, 1967), del crítico José Rodríguez Feo, fundador junto a Lezama Lima de la revista Orígenes, y luego, con Virgilio Piñera, de Ciclón.…

Essay

Invention of Love

La invención del amor

Ilan Stavans

Traducción al español de Anahí Ramírez Alfaro Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is also Professor of Poetry at Columbia…

Essay

Eielson: Mutatis Mutandis

David Medina Portillo

Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 1924) forma parte de una generación de poetas peruanos que reúne, entre otros, a Javier Sologuren, Blanca Varela y Sebastián Salazar Bondy. Se trata de un…

Essay

Aguántame tantito más: Pathology of an Urban Tale

Bradley Warren Davis

Unlike Juan Rulfo, who described the submissive and fatalistic lives of country folks living in extreme deprivation in a depressed agricultural setting, Rose Mary Salum, in a little more than…

Essay

Gioconda Belli, the Naked Voice at the Cutting Edge of Poetry

Gioconda Belli, La voz desnuda a la orilla de la poesía

Benito Pastoriza Iyodo

Readers do not always have the opportunity to know a writer whose poetic work possesses such intensity for life, where the parameters of esthetic experience become fixed by the profoundness…

Essay

Mi íntima multitud: la pluralidad existencial que nos define

Gioconda Belli

Hoy me llega en la intimidad de mi jardín un paquete conteniendo el nuevo poemario de Gioconda Belli. Lo abro con ansiedad y gran expectativa porque llevo años leyendo la…