< The latest addition to my website are two stories by Mario Bellatin. The first is a new translation of Salón de belleza (Beauty Salon) and the second an untranslated work Poeta ciego [Blind Poet]. The first tells of a beauty salon for women run by three cross-dressing, gay men. When an AIDS-like pandemic breaks ... Read more
The latest addition to my website is Pola Oloixarac‘s Mona (Mona). Our heroine/narrator is Mona Tarrile-Byrne, a Peruvian writer. Her first novel was well received and helped get her onto a doctoral programme at Stanford. Her second novel and, indeed,her personal life are not going so well. She has been nominated to receive the prestigious … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alonso Cueto‘s La viajera del viento (The Wind Traveller). This is about the Peruvian war against Shining Path guerrillas and the consequences of that war. Ángel was in the army fighting the guerrillas at that time. He is ordered to dispose of the bodies of alleged guerillas tortured … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Gustavo Faverón Patriau‘s Vivir abajo [Living in the Basement]. This novel, already declared a key novel of twenty-first century Latin American literature by some critics, is a brilliant and complex novel about the politics and violence of Latin America and the United States but also of their culture. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mario Vargas Llosa‘s Tiempos recios [Hard Times]. The novel deals with the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, by Guatemalan forces, supported by the CIA and the US Ambassador to Guatemala. He was primarily overthrown because he had wanted to tax the United … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José María Arguedas‘Todas las sangres [All the Bloodlines]. This is José María Arguedas’ longest book and goes into great detail about a story of oppressed Indians, ruthless Peruvians and a US mining company. Fermín and Bruno Aragón de Peralta are rich brothers who hate each other. Their father … Read more
The latest addition to my website is José María Arguedas‘s Los ríos profundos (Deep Waters). This novel, praised by Mario Vargas Llosa as one of the great Peruvian novels, is a semi-autobiographical novel. Arguedas’ mother died when he was two and a half. When his father remarried, his stepmother already had three children. He was … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miguel Ildefonso‘s Hotel Lima [Hotel Lima]. Our hero/narrator is called Dante and we follow him in his journey underground, though his underground is merely the seedier parts of Lima, where he meets prostitutes, drug addicts, strange women and, in particular, poètes maudits. He comes in contact with an … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alfredo Bryce Echenique‘s Las obras infames de Pancho Marambio [The Infamous Works of Pancho Marambio]. Bienvenido Salvador Buenaventura is a fifty-four year old successful lawyer in Lima. He has never been married. His parents and two brother are both dead, the men from alcoholism. The two others were … Read more
Peruvian novelist Miguel Gutiérrez died yesterday, shortly before his seventy-sixth birthday. I can find no reports in English but it has been in announced in Spanish here and here. He is best-known for his novel about incest El mundo sin Xóchitl [The World Without Xochitl], which I thought was an excellent novel. Neither this novel … Read more