Ilan Stavans's Books

The Essential Ilan Stavans

By: Ilan Stavans

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The Essential Ilan Stavans

By: Ilan Stavans

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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360

Publisher

Psychology Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0415927536

ISBN 13

9780415927536

On Borrowed Words

A Memoir of Language

By: Ilan Stavans

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Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and English-at various points in Ilan Stavans's life, each of these has been his primary language. In this rich memoir, the linguistic chameleon outlines his remarkable cultural heritage from his birth in politically fragile Mexico, through his years as a student activist and young Zionist in Israel, to his present career as a noted and controversial academic and writer. Along the way, Stavans introduces readers to some of the remarkable members of his family-his brother, a musical wunderkind; his father, a Mexican soap opera star; his grandmother, who arrived in Mexico from Eastern Europe in 1929 and wrote her own autobiography. Masterfully weaving personal reminiscences with a provocative investigation into language acquisition and cultural code switching, On Borrowed Words is a compelling exploration of Stavans's search for his place in the world.

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273

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0142000949

ISBN 13

9780142000946

Art and Anger

Essays on Politics and the Imagination

By: Ilan Stavans

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Art and Anger

Essays on Politics and the Imagination

By: Ilan Stavans

The crossroads where politics and the imagination meet--from the shaping of Latin America's collective identity to Columbus's afterlife.

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276

Publisher

UNM Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826317448

ISBN 13

9780826317445

Jewish Literature

A Very Short Introduction

By: Ilan Stavans

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Jewish Literature

A Very Short Introduction

By: Ilan Stavans

An in-depth, thorough exploration of modern Jewish literature from 1492 to the 21st century, rotating around the concept of "aterritoriality" to appreciate the diasporic journey Jews have embarked on across geographic and linguistic spheres from 1492 to the present. At the centre of it are canonical figures like Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Anne Frank, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Jacobo Timerman, Moacyr Scliar, and Susan Sontag. Unlike the output of other national literatures, Jewish literature doesn't have a fixed address. As a result, its practitioners are at once insiders and outsiders"--

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173

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190076976

ISBN 13

9780190076979

A Critic's Journey

By: Ilan Stavans

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A Critic's Journey

By: Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans has been a lightning rod for cultural discussion and criticism his entire career. In A Critic's Journey, he takes on his own Jewish and Hispanic upbringing with an autobiographical focus and his typical flair with words, exploring the relationship between the two cultures from his own and also from others' experiences. Stavans has been hailed as a voice for Latino culture thanks to his Hispanic upbringing, but as a Jew and a Caucasian, he's also an outsider to that culture-something that's sharpened his perspective (and some of his critics' swords). In this book of essays, he looks at the creative process from that point of view, exploring everything from the translation of Don Quixote to Hispanic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Latin America. Book jacket.

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210

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472033824

ISBN 13

9780472033829

Quixote: The Novel and the World

By: Ilan Stavans

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Quixote: The Novel and the World

By: Ilan Stavans

A groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world. The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.

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202

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393248380

ISBN 13

9780393248388

The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories

By: Ilan Stavans

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The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories

By: Ilan Stavans

The One-Handed Pianist was published to acclaim in the early 1990’s, with the two-part Spanish edition winning the Latino Literature Prize in 1989 and the Gamma Literature Prize in 1992. Its tales look at what it means to be Jewish in the Hispanic world—a world in which spirituality is often exercised outside the realm of orthodoxy. Stavans constructs fables that raise questions about ethnicity and community; even Stavans’ person raises questions about ethnicity and community: what does it mean that a Jew of Eastern European lineage can call himself Latino and speak for that group?

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207

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Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810124602

ISBN 13

9780810124608

Popol Vuh: A Retelling

By: Ilan Stavans

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Popol Vuh: A Retelling

By: Ilan Stavans

An inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Maya myth of creation by acclaimed Latin American author and scholar Ilan Stavans, gorgeously illustrated by Salvadoran folk artist Gabriela Larios and introduced by renowned author, diplomat, and environmental activist Homero Aridjis. The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popol Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were being threatened with destruction by European conquest and Christianity, it was written down in verse by members of the K’iche’ nobility in what is today Guatemala. In 1701, that text was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar and ethnographer before vanishing mysteriously. Cosmic in scope and yet intimately human, the Popol Vuh offers invaluable insight into the Maya way of life before being decimated by colonization—their code of ethics, their views on death and the afterlife, and their devotion to passion, courage, and the natural world. It tells the story of how the world was created in a series of rehearsals that included wooden dummies, demi-gods, and eventually humans. It describes the underworld, Xibalba—a place as harrowing as Dante’s hell—and relates the legend of the ultimate king, who, in the face of tragedy, became a spirit that accompanies his people in their struggle for survival. Popol Vuh: A Retelling is a one-of-a-kind prose rendition of this sacred text that is as seminal as the Bible and the Qur’an, the Ramayana and the Odyssey. Award-winning scholar of Latin American literature Ilan Stavans brings a fresh creative energy to the Popol Vuh, giving a new generation of readers the opportunity to connect with this timeless story and with the plight of the indigenous people of the Americas. Praise for Popol Vuh: A Retelling: “Salvadoran illustrator Larios provides lush images to accompany stories of the Earth and the underworld, Xibalba, and the animals and gods that inhabit them…. A beautiful interpretation of pivotal Central American history told through contemporary illustration and language.” —Kirkus Reviews “In these pages you will find an adroit retelling of a complex and often confusing tale with a vast and bewildering cast of characters. Approaching the Popol Vuh with a fresh eye and the necessary erudition, Ilan Stavans, the distinguished scholar of Hispanic culture, nimbly conveys the content and the sense of the original, retaining its magic and fascination, while rendering it more accessible to a wider readership. Popol Vuh: A Retelling artfully presents the case for the centrality of this magisterial story to the cultural consciousness of the Americas and for the urgency of its message.” —Homero Aridjis, from the foreword "At a time when so many of us ask ourselves about the end of the world as we know it, few books could be more relevant than this sacred text of the Maya. In a mesmerizing, illuminating new translation, Ilan Stavans brings to contemporary readers this lyrical epic, with its messages from a lost civilization obsessed, as ours should be, with the inevitable cycles of catastrophe and change. The Popol Vuh encourages us to contemplate the perpetual conflict between truth and falsehood, light and darkness, so that we may find the wisdom to emerge as better people." —Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden "Popol Vuh is one of the seminal foundational 'texts' of the Americas before it became 'America'—and one so few of us really know much about. Again, Ilan Stavans is infusing the US of A with the cultures and stories that have been traditionally erased or ignored and forgotten. All I can say is, another amazing Stavans project!" —Julia Alvarez "The Popol Vuh is the great book of creation of the Maya K'iche' culture, and Ilan Stavans has embarked on an intrepid adventure of recreation; he returns to a myth of origin to endow it with vibrant topicality, proving that rewriting a legend is a way of bewitching time." —Juan Villoro, author of God Is Round “Many translators, scholars, and poets have brought us close to the radiant eminence of our Mayan origin story, the Popol Vuh. None touch its wondrous dynamism and epic elegance like Stavans and Larios. Free of the formal constraints of the K’iche’ original, Stavans’s delivers a masterful retelling that invites us into chimeric dreams: from the mischievous first peoples and the quests of those grown from seeds, to hybrid creatures and demi-god twins with battles lost and won. Larios’s dexterous admixture of cool washes and vibrant color palettes along with a K’iche’-inspired line-work aesthetic, further unzip our minds to a shared ancestral imaginary. Only my Guatemalan abuelita could cast such storytelling spells over me. Together, Stavans and Larios invite us all to dance as the children we once were and will become. A gift!” —Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Long Stories Cut Short: Fiction from the Borderlands “Ilan Stavans's retelling of this ancient and sacred story of the Mayan people is as exquisitely written as it is necessary.” —Eduardo Halfon, author of Mourning Praise for Ilan Stavans: “Ilan Stavans is an inventive interpreter of the contemporary cultures of the Americas…. Cantankerous and clever, sprightly and serious, Stavans is a voracious thinker. In his writing, life serves to illuminate literature—and vice versa: he is unafraid to court controversy, unsettle opinions, make enemies. In short, Stavans is an old-fashioned intellectual, a brilliant interpreter of his triple heritage—Jewish, Mexican, and American.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “…in the void created by the death of his compatriot Octavio Paz, Ilan Stavans has emerged as Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” —The Washington Post “Ilan Stavans has done as much as anyone alive to bridge the hemisphere’s linguistic gaps.” —The Miami Herald “A canon-maker.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education “Ilan Stavans is a maverick intellectual whose canonical work has already produced a whole array of marvels... His incisive essays are redefining Jewish literature.” —The Forward “Ilan Stavans is the rarest of North American writers—he sees the Americas whole. Not since Octavio Paz has Mexico given us an intellectual so able to violate borders, with learning and grace.” —Richard Rodriguez “In the multicultural rainbow that is contemporary America, no one may be more representative of the state of the union than Ilan Stavans.” —Newsday “Ilan Stavans may very well succeed in becoming the Octavio Paz of our age.” —The San Francisco Chronicle “A virtuoso critic with an exuberant, encyclopedic, restless mind.” —The Forward “Ilan Stavans has the sharp eye of the internal exile. Writing about the sometimes reluctant reconquista of North America by Spanish-speaking cultures or the development of his own identity, he deals with both the life of the mind and the life of the streets.” —John Sayles “Lively and intelligent, eclectic, sharp-tongued.” —Peter Matthiessen “I think Stavans has one of the best grips around on what makes Spanish America tick.” —Gregory Rabassa “Ilan Stavans is a disciple of Kafka and Borges. He accepts social identity broadly, in the most cosmopolitan terms… His impulse is to broaden, not to narrow; he finds understanding through complication of identity, not through the easy gestures of ethnic politics.” —The New York Times “Ilan Stavans has established himself as an invaluable commentator of literature.” —Phillip Lopate

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Page Count

277

Publisher

Restless Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1632062410

ISBN 13

9781632062413

Octavio Paz

A Meditation

By: Ilan Stavans

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Octavio Paz

A Meditation

By: Ilan Stavans

In this small, memorable meditation on Octavio Paz as a thinker and man of action, Ilan Stavans - described by the Washington Post as "one of our foremost cultural critics" and by the New York Times as "the czar of Latino culture in the United States" - ponders Paz's intellectual courage against the ideological tapestry of his epoch and shows us what lessons can be learned from him. He does so by exploring such timeless issues as the crossroads where literature and politics meet, the place of criticism in society, and Mexico's difficult quest to come to terms with its own history.".

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104

Publisher

University of Arizona Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816520909

ISBN 13

9780816520909

Resurrecting Hebrew

By: Ilan Stavans

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Resurrecting Hebrew

By: Ilan Stavans

Part of the Jewish Encounter series Here is the stirring story of how Hebrew was rescued from the fate of a dead language to become the living tongue of a modern nation. Ilan Stavans’s quest begins with a dream featuring a beautiful woman speaking an unknown language. When the language turns out to be Hebrew, a friend diagnoses “language withdrawal,” and Stavans sets out in search of his own forgotten Hebrew as well as the man who helped revive the language at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. The search for Ben-Yehuda, who raised his eldest son in linguistic isolation–not even allowing him to hear the songs of birds–so that he would be “the first Hebrew-speaking child,” becomes a journey full of paradox. It was Orthodox anti-Zionists who had Ben-Yehuda arrested for sedition, and, although Ben-Yehuda was devoted to Jewish life in Palestine, it was in Manhattan that he worked on his great dictionary of the Hebrew language. The resurrection of Hebrew raises urgent questions about the role language plays in Jewish survival, questions that lead Stavans not merely into the roots of modern Hebrew but into the origins of Israel itself. All the tensions between the Diaspora and the idea of a promised land pulse beneath the surface of Stavans’s story, which is a fascinating biography as well as a moving personal journey.

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239

Publisher

Schocken

Published Date

ISBN 10

0805242627

ISBN 13

9780805242621

With All Thine Heart

Love and the Bible

By: Ilan Stavans,Mordecai Drache

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With All Thine Heart

Love and the Bible

By: Ilan Stavans,Mordecai Drache

Is the Bible actually a love story between a deity and a people? And what does this love story have to do with the modern world? In With All Thine Heart distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans speaks to freelance writer Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible. Presented in an engaging, conversational format and touched with striking artwork, the textured dialogue between Stavans and Drache is meant to show how the Bible is a multidimensional text and one that, when considered over the course of history, still has the power to shape our world. The theme of love provides the connective tissue that binds this work. Addressing a wide range of topics, from biblical archaeology and fundamentalism to Hollywood movies, lexicography, and the act of praying, With All Thine Heart suggests that the Hebrew Bible is a novel worth decoding patiently, such as one does with classics like Don Quixote de la Mancha, In Search of Lost Time, and Anna Karenina. Similar to the protagonists in these tales, biblical characters, although not shaped with the artistic nuance of modern literature, allow for astonishing insight. This exploration of love through the pages of the Bible--organized chronologically from Genesis to Exodus and followed by insightful meditations on the Song of Songs and the Book of Job--is a delightful intellectual and spiritual treat . . . Shema Ysrael!

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206

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813547970

ISBN 13

9780813547978

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again

By: Ilan Stavans

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And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again

By: Ilan Stavans

In this rich, eye-opening and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists and translators from more than thirty countries offer a profound, kaleidoscopic portrait of lives transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. As COVID-19 has become the defining global experience of our time, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto corners of the world beyond our own. And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante's Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection detail the harrowing realities of the pandemic, while pointing toward a more connected future.

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372

Publisher

Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published Date

ISBN 10

9353059615

ISBN 13

9789353059613

Translation as Home

A Multilingual Life

By: Ilan Stavans

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Translation as Home

A Multilingual Life

By: Ilan Stavans

Translation as Home is a collection of autobiographical essays by Ilan Stavans that eloquently and unequivocally make the case that translation is not only a career, but a way of life. Born in Mexico City, Ilan Stavans is an essayist, anthologist, literary scholar, translator, and editor. Stavans has changed languages at various points in his life: from Yiddish to Spanish to Hebrew and English. A controversial public intellectual, he is the world’s authority on hybrid languages and on the history of dictionaries. His influential studies on Spanglish have redefined many fields of study, and he has become an international authority on translation as a mechanism of survival. This collection deals with Stavans’s three selves: Mexican, Jewish, and American. The volume presents his recent essays, some previously unpublished, addressing the themes of language, identity, and translation and emphasizing his work in Latin American and Jewish studies. It also features conversations between Stavans and writers, educators, and translators, including Regina Galasso, the author of the introduction and editor of the volume.

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327

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1487548079

ISBN 13

9781487548070

A Most Imperfect Union

A Contrarian History of the United States

By: Ilan Stavans

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A Most Imperfect Union

A Contrarian History of the United States

By: Ilan Stavans

A cultural critic and an award-winning cartoonist subvert the conventional story of American history and focus on the vibrant and tireless workers, immigrants, homemakers and slaves who helped create and mold America as much as any celebrated white man.

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290

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465036694

ISBN 13

9780465036691

El Iluminado

A Graphic Novel

By: Ilan Stavans,Steve Sheinkin

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El Iluminado

A Graphic Novel

By: Ilan Stavans,Steve Sheinkin

When young Rolando Perez falls to his death from a cliff outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, the mysteries immediately begin to accumulate. Was he pushed or did he jump? What are the documents that Rolando was willing sacrifice himself to protect from his family, the police, and the Catholic Church? And what does a colorful concha pastry have to do with any of this? In the midst of the investigation, Professor Ilan Stavans arrives in Santa Fe to give a lecture about the area's long-buried Jewish history. He's looking forward to relaxing afterwards with an evening of opera, but his presentation on "crypto-Jews" attracts unexpected attention, and soon Ilan is drawn into a desperate race to find the long-lost documents that might hold the key to Rolando's death. Ilan's detective work leads him to taco joints, desert ranches, soaring cathedrals, and, finally, deep into the region's past, where he encounters another young man: Luis de Carvajal, aka "El Iluminado," a sixteenth-century religious dissenter. In a tale of martyrdom that eerily echoes Rolando's, Carvajal fled Spain for colonial Mexico at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, searching for his religious heritage -- a hunt for which he, like Rolando, would pay the ultimate price. In El Iluminado, esteemed literary critic Ilan Stavans and author and illustrator Steve Sheinkin present a secret history of religion in the Americas, showing how thousands of European refugees have left a trail of ghostly footprints -- and troves of mysteries -- across the American Southwest.

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210

Publisher

Basic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465033016

ISBN 13

9780465033010

Return to Centro Histórico

A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots

By: Ilan Stavans

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Return to Centro Histórico

A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots

By: Ilan Stavans

After a stirring e-mail exchange with his father, awardwinning essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans decided to do something bizarre: revisit his hometown, Mexico City, accompanied by a tourist guide. But rather than seeking his roots in the neighborhood where he grew up, he headed to the Centro Histórico, the downtown area at the heart of the world’s largest metropolis. It was there that conversos, the hidden Jews escaping the might of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, were burned at the stake. And, centuries later, it was the same section where Jewish immigrants, both Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim and Sephardim from the Ottoman Empire, made their homes as peddlers. In a sense, Centro Histórico is to Mexico what the Lower East Side is to the United States: a platform for reinventing one’s self in the New World. With the same linguistic verve and insight that has made him one of the most distinguished voices in American literature today, Ilan Stavans invites readers along for a personal journey that is not only his own, but that of an entire culture. In Return to Centro Histórico he makes it possible to understand the intimate role that Jews have played in the development of Hispanic civilization.

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169

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813552265

ISBN 13

9780813552262

The United States of Mestizo

By: Ilan Stavans

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The United States of Mestizo

By: Ilan Stavans

The United States of Mestizo is a powerful manifesto attesting to the fundamental changes the nation has undergone in the last half-century. Writer Ilan Stavans meditates on how the cross-fertilizing process that defined the Americas during the colonial period--the racial melding of Europeans and indigenous peoples--foretells the miscegenation that is the most salient profile of America today. If, as W.E.B. DuBois once argued, the twentieth century was defined by a color fracture at its core, Stavans believes the twenty-first will be shaped by a multi-color line that will make us all a sum of parts.

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NewSouth Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1588382885

ISBN 13

9781588382887

Latinos in the United States

By: Ilan Stavans

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Latinos in the United States

By: Ilan Stavans

As the largest and youngest minority group in the United States, the 60 million Latinos living in the U.S. represent the second-largest concentration of Hispanic people in the entire world, after Mexico. Needless to say, the population of Latinos in the U.S. is causing a shift, not only changing the demographic landscape of the country, but also impacting national culture, politics, and spoken language. While Latinos comprise a diverse minority group -- with various religious beliefs, political ideologies, and social values-commentators on both sides of the political divide have lumped Latino Americans into a homogenous group that is often misunderstood. Latinos in the United States: What Everyone Needs to Know(R) provides a wide-ranging, multifaceted exploration of Latino American history and culture, as well as the forces shaping this minority group in the U.S. From exploring the origins of the term "Latino" and examining what constitutes Latin America, to tracing topical issues like DREAMers, the mass incarceration of Latino males, and the controversial relationship between Latin America and the United States, Ilan Stavans seeks to understand the complexities and unique position of Latino Americans. Throughout he breaks down the various subgroups within the Latino minority (Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans on the mainland, and so on), and the degree to which these groups constitute -- or don't -- a homogenous community, their history, and where their future challenges lie. Stavans, one of the world's foremost authorities on global Hispanic civilization, sees Latino culture as undergoing dramatic changes as a result of acculturation, changes that are fostering a new "mestizo" identity that is part Hispanic and part American. However, Latinos living in the United States are also impacting American culture. As Ilan Stavans argues, no other minority group will have a more decisive impact on the future of the United States.

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225

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190670193

ISBN 13

9780190670191

The Seventh Heaven

Travels through Jewish Latin America

By: Ilan Stavans

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The Seventh Heaven

Travels through Jewish Latin America

By: Ilan Stavans

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.

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Page Count

418

Publisher

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822987155

ISBN 13

9780822987154

On Self-Translation

Meditations on Language

By: Ilan Stavans

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On Self-Translation

Meditations on Language

By: Ilan Stavans

Finalist for the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the Essay category From award-winning, internationally known scholar and translator Ilan Stavans comes On Self-Translation, a collection of essays and conversations on language in its multifaceted forms. Stavans discusses the way syntax is being restructured by texting and other technologies. He examines how the alphabet itself is being forgotten by the young, how finger snapping has taken on a new meaning, how the use of ellipses has lapsed, and how autocorrect is shaping the way we communicate. In an incisive meditation, he shows how translating one's own work reinvents oneself in another tongue. The volume includes tête-à-têtes with Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Wilbur and short-fiction master Lydia Davis, as well as dialogues on silence, multilingualism, poetry, and the durability of the classics. Stavans's explorations cover Spanish, English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and the hybrid lexicon of Spanglish. He muses on the meaning of foreignness and on living and dying in different languages. Among his primary concerns are the role and history of dictionaries and the extent to which the authority of language academies is less a reality than a delusion. He concludes with renditions into Spanglish of portions of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and The Little Prince. The wide range of themes and engaging yet informed style confirm Stavans's status, in the words of the Washington Post, as "Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast." This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7137 .

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286

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438471505

ISBN 13

9781438471501

Spanglish

The Making of a New American Language

By: Ilan Stavans

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Spanglish

The Making of a New American Language

By: Ilan Stavans

With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America wasanointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. Spanish, present on this continent since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. The nation's unofficial second language, it is highly visible on several 24-hour TV networks and on more than 200 radio stations across the country. But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.

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292

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Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060087765

ISBN 13

9780060087760

The Wall

By: Ilan Stavans

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The Wall

By: Ilan Stavans

Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry The Wall is a poetic exploration—across time, space, and language, real as well as metaphorical—of the U.S.-Mexican wall dividing the two civilizations, of similar walls (Jerusalem, China, Berlin, Warsaw, etc.) in history, and of the act of separating people by ideology, class, race, and other subterfuges. It is an indictment of hateful political rhetoric. In the spirit of Virgil’s Aeneid and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Master, it gives voice in symphonic fashion to an assortment of participants (immigrants, border patrol, soldiers, activists, presidents, people dead and alive) involved in the debate on walls. It brings in elements of literature and pop culture, fashion and cuisine. Poetry becomes a tool to explore raw human emotions in all its extremes.

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224

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University of Pittsburgh Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822983354

ISBN 13

9780822983354

Knowledge and Censorship

By: I. Stavans,Verónica Albin

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Knowledge and Censorship

By: I. Stavans,Verónica Albin

This volume collects four sharp philosophical essays by Ilan Stavans on the acquisition of knowledge in multi-ethnic environments, the role that dictionaries play in the preservation of memory, the function of libraries in the electronic age, and the uses of censorship. In the second part of the volume, Verónica Albin engages Stavans in a series of four conversations in which he expounds on the arguments he developed in the essays.

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177

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Palgrave Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

1403984107

ISBN 13

9781403984104

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art

By: Ilan Stavans,Jorge J. E. Gracia

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art

By: Ilan Stavans,Jorge J. E. Gracia

The essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans and the analytic philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia share long-standing interests in the intersection of art and ideas. Here they take thirteen pieces of Latino art, each reproduced in color, as occasions for thematic discussions. Whether the work at the center of a particular conversation is a triptych created by the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ, a mural by the graffiti artist BEAR_TCK, or Above All Things, a photograph by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Stavans and Gracia's exchanges inevitably open out to literature, history, ethics, politics, religion, and visual culture more broadly. Autobiographical details pepper Stavans and Gracia's conversations, as one or the other tells what he finds meaningful in a given work. Sparkling with insight, their exchanges allow the reader to eavesdrop on two celebrated intellectuals—worldly, erudite, and unafraid to disagree—as they reflect on the pleasures of seeing.

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241

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Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822376881

ISBN 13

9780822376880

I Love My Selfie

By: Ilan Stavans

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I Love My Selfie

By: Ilan Stavans

What explains our current obsession with selfies? In I Love My Selfie noted cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the selfie's historical and cultural roots by discussing everything from Greek mythology and Shakespeare to Andy Warhol, James Franco, and Pope Francis. He sees selfies as tools people use to disguise or present themselves as spontaneous and casual. This collaboration includes a portfolio of fifty autoportraits by the artist ADÁL; he and Stavans use them as a way to question the notion of the self and to engage with artists, celebrities, technology, identity, and politics. Provocative and engaging, I Love My Selfie will change the way readers think about this unavoidable phenomenon of twenty-first-century life.

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195

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Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822373173

ISBN 13

9780822373179

The Hispanic Condition

The Power of a People

By: Ilan Stavans

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The Hispanic Condition

The Power of a People

By: Ilan Stavans

In The Hispanic Condition, Ilan Stavans offers a subtle and insightful meditation on Hispanic society in the United States. A native of Mexico, Stavans has emerged as one of the most distinguished Latin American writers of our time, an award-winning novelist and critic praised by scholars and beloved by readers. In this pioneering psycho-historical profile, he delves into the cultural differences and similarities among the five major Hispanic groups: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Central and South Americans, and Spaniards. Masterfully interweaving historical, literary, and political references with his personal experience, Stavans discusses the divisions within a common heritage; customs of music, love, sex, marriage, and religious belief; the role of the intellectual in society; ideological struggle; and the hopeful visions of the future at the core of a civilization rooted in the trauma of the past.

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288

Publisher

Harper Perennial

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060935863

ISBN 13

9780060935863

José Vasconcelos

The Prophet of Race

By: Ilan Stavans

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José Vasconcelos

The Prophet of Race

By: Ilan Stavans

Mexican educator and thinker Jose Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans--a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, "Mestizaje" key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America--is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, "Mestizaje" suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos's long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, "The Race Problem in Latin America," where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.

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142

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813551048

ISBN 13

9780813551043

What is American Literature?

By: Ilan Stavans

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What is American Literature?

By: Ilan Stavans

An incisive, thought-provoking, and timely meditation, at once panoramic and synoptic, on American literature for an age of xenophobia, heightened nationalism, and economic disparity.The distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the nation's identity through the prism of its books, from the indigenous past to the early settlers, the colonial period, the age of independence, its ascendance as a global power, and its shallow, fracturing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.The central motives that make the United States a flawed experiment - its celebration of do-it-yourself individualism, its purported exceptionalism, and its constitutional government based on checks and balances - are explored through canonical works like Mark Twain's The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson's poetry, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, and immigrant voices such as those of Americo Paredes, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, andothers. This is literary criticism at its best-informed: broad-ranged yet pungent and uncompromising.

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216

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198816219

ISBN 13

9780198816218

The Riddle of Cantinflas

Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture

By: Ilan Stavans

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The Riddle of Cantinflas

Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture

By: Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans's collection of essays on kitsch and high art in the Americas makes a return with thirteen new colorful conversations that deliver Stavans's trademark wit and provocative analysis. "A Dream Act Deferred" discusses an issue that is at once and always topical in the dialogue of Hispanic popular culture: immigration. This essay generated a vociferous response when first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as the issue of immigration was contested in states like Arizona, and is included here as a new addition that adds a rich layer to Stavans's vibrant discourse. Fitting in this reconfiguration of his analytical conversations on Hispanic popular culture is Stavans's "Arrival: Notes from an Interloper," which recounts his origins as a social critic and provides the reader with interactive insight into the mind behind the matter. Once again delightfully humorous and perceptive, Stavans delivers an expanded collection that has the power to go even further beyond common assumptions and helps us understand Mexican popular culture and its counterparts in the United States.

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224

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UNM Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826352561

ISBN 13

9780826352569

¡Muy Pop!

Conversations on Latino Popular Culture

By: Frederick Luis Aldama,Ilan Stavans

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¡Muy Pop!

Conversations on Latino Popular Culture

By: Frederick Luis Aldama,Ilan Stavans

Although investigations of Hispanic popular culture were approached for decades as part of folklore studies, in recent years scholarly explorations—of lucha libre, telenovelas, comic strips, comedy, baseball, the novela rosa and the detective novel, sci-fi, even advertising—have multiplied. What has been lacking is an overarching canvas that offers context for these studies, focusing on the crucial, framing questions: What is Hispanic pop culture? How does it change over time and from region to region? What is the relationship between highbrow and popular culture in the Hispanic world? Does it make sense to approach the whole Hispanic world as homogenized when understanding Hispanic popular culture? What are the differences between nations, classes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and so on? And what distinguishes Hispanic popular culture in the United States? In ¡Muy Pop!, Ilan Stavans and Frederick Luis Aldama carry on a sustained, free-flowing, book-length conversation about these questions and more, concentrating on a wide range of pop manifestations and analyzing them at length. In addition to making Hispanic popular culture visible to the first-time reader, ¡Muy Pop! sheds new light on the making and consuming of Hispanic pop culture for academics, specialists, and mainstream critics.

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155

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0472029444

ISBN 13

9780472029440

Reclaiming Travel

By: Ilan Stavans,Joshua Ellison

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Reclaiming Travel

By: Ilan Stavans,Joshua Ellison

Based on a controversial opinion piece originally published in the New York Times, Reclaiming Travel is a provocative meditation on the meaning of travel from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison seek to understand why we travel and what has come to be missing from our contemporary understanding of travel. Engaging with canonical and contemporary texts, they explore the differences between travel and tourism, the relationship between travel and memory, the genre of travel writing, and the power of mapmaking, Stavans and Ellison call for a rethinking of the art of travel, which they define as a transformative quest that gives us deeper access to ourselves. Tourism, Stavans and Ellison argue, is inauthentic, choreographed, sterile, shallow, and rooted in colonialism. They critique theme parks and kitsch tourism, such as the shantytown hotels in South Africa where guests stay in shacks made of corrugated metal and cardboard yet have plenty of food, water and space. Tourists, they assert, are merely content with escapism, thrill seeking, or obsessively snapping photographs. Resisting simple moralizing, the authors also remind us that people don’t divide neatly into crude categories like travelers and tourists. They provoke us to reflect on the opportunities and perils in our own habits. In this powerful manifesto, Stavans and Ellison argue that travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression—a search for meaning not only in our own lives but also in the lives of others. It is not about the destination; rather, travel is about loss, disorientation, and discovering our place in the universe.

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Page Count

118

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822375591

ISBN 13

9780822375593

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