Most Popular Books 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.

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.

This long-awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of García Márquez''s life up to the publication of his classic 100 Years of Solitude. Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the life and works of the Nobel Laureate, father of magical realism, and bestselling author in the history of the Spanish language. As García Márquez''s impact endures on well into his ninth decade, Stavans''s keen insights constitute the definitive re-appraisal of the literary giant''s life and corpus. The later part of his life will be covered in a second book.

A cultural critic of extraordinary erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, and boundless curiosity, Ilan Stavans, an Ashkenazic Jew who grew up in Mexico, negotiates wildly varied topics as effortlessly and deftly as he manages the multiple perspectives of a dual national, religious, and ethnic identity. In Singer’s Typewriter and Mine, a follow-up to The Inveterate Dreamer (Nebraska, 2001), Stavans interweaves his own experience with that of other Jewish writers and thinkers, past and present, to explore modern Jewish culture across the boundaries of language and nation. Juxtaposing the personal and the analytical, these essays and conversations take up the oeuvres of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Mario Vargas Llosa, translation and God’s language, storytelling as midrash, anti-Semitism in Hispanic America, Yiddish and Sephardic literatures, the connection between humor and terror, impostors as cultural agents, the creators of the King James Bible, and the encounter between Jewish and Latino civilizations, to name but a few of Stavans’s topics here. Funny, engaging, and provocative, this collection continues Stavans’s project of opening new vistas in our cross-cultural understanding of language, literature, and life.

Sabor Judio celebrates the delicious fusion of two culinary traditions, Jewish and Mexican. Written with joy and verve, Ilan Stavans and Margaret Boyle''s lavishly illustrated cookbook demonstrates how cooking and eating connect Jewish Mexicans across places and generations. Featuring 100 deeply personal recipes enjoyed by Jewish Mexicans around the world, the book is organized by meal—desayuno (breakfast), comida (lunch), and cena (dinner)—and also includes dishes made for Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Hanukkah, Shavuot, and other holidays.&8239; Sabor Judio isn''t only a cookbook; it is also a vibrant history of Jewish immigration to Mexico from 1492 to the present. It explains how flavors and dishes evolved in Mexican and Jewish kitchens and how they fused into a distinct cuisine, mainly by the labor of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, and converso women. This cookbook is the product of two award-winning, internationally known Jewish Mexican writers and foodies who spent a decade gathering recipes and personal narratives from Jewish Mexican households. The result is a dynamic and delicious array of recipes and experiences, infusing important cultural heritage into this essential culinary record.

Cultural critic and acclaimed author Ilan Stavans captures the joys, nuances, and multiple dimensions of Latino culture within the context of the English language. Latino USA, like the history it so entertainingly relates, is a dazzling kaleidoscope of irreverence, wit, subversion, anarchy, politics, humanism, celebration, and serious and responsible history.

The story of Jewish literature is a kaleidoscopic one, multilingual and transnational in character, spanning the globe as well as the centuries. In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish literature from 1492 to the present, cultural historian Ilan Stavans focuses on its multilingual and transnational nature. Stavans presents a wide range of traditions within Jewish literature and the variety of writers who made those traditions possible. Represented are writers as dissimilar as Luis de Carvajal the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Anzia Yezierska, Elias Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Irving Howe, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Amos Oz, Moacyr Scliar, and David Grossman. The story of Jewish literature spans the globe as well as the centuries, from the marrano poets and memorialists of medieval Spain, to the sprawling Yiddish writing in Ashkenaz (the "Pale of Settlement'' in Eastern Europe), to the probing narratives of Jewish immigrants to the United States and other parts of the New World. It also examines the accounts of horror during the Holocaust, the work of Israeli authors since the creation of the Jewish State in 1948, and the "ingathering" of Jewish works in Brazil, Bulgaria, Argentina, and South Africa at the end of the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic introduction to Jewish literature presents its subject matter as constantly changing and adapting.

In 2017, the New York Times announced that the long-lost memoir of Luis de Carvajal the Younger had been rediscovered. Considered the first autobiography by a Jew in the Americas, the book had been stolen decades earlier from Mexico’s National Archives. Here, Ilan Stavans recounts the extraordinary and entertaining story of the reappearance of this precious object and how its discovery opened up new vistas onto the world of secret Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition. Called el Mozo (the Younger) to distinguish him from an uncle of the same name who was governor of Nuevo León, Luis de Carvajal learned of his Jewishness after being raised a Catholic. He came to recognize himself as a messiah for fellow crypto-Jews, and he was burned at the stake on December 8, 1596, in the biggest auto-da-fé in all of Latin America. His memoir—a 180-page manuscript written by a crypto-Jew targeted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition for unlawful proselytizing activities—was not only distinct but of enormous value. With characters such as conniving academics embroiled in a scholarly feud, a magnanimous philanthropist, naïve booksellers, and a secondary cast that could be taken from a David Lynch film, The Return of Carvajal recounts the global intrigue that placed crypto-Jewish culture at the heart of contemporary debates on religion and identity.

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 Huckleberry Finn, 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 Américo Paredes, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others. This is literary criticism at its best-informed: broad-ranged yet pungent and uncompromising.

In 13 essays, Stavans (Latin American and Latino culture, Amherst College, Massachusetts) explores the history of lexicography across many languages, sharing strange meaning inconsistencies, unusual origins, and extraordinary anecdotes. He does not provide an index. Annotation 2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

A sixteenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, has become one of the most rebellious and lasting icons in modern times, on par with Mahatma Gandhi, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Nelson Mandela. Referenced in ranchera, tejana, and hip-hop lyrics, and celebrated in popular art as a guerrillera with rifle and bullet belts, Sor Juana has become ubiquitous. The conduits keep multiplying: statues, lotería cards, key chains, recipe books, coffee mugs, Día de los Muertos costumes. Ironically, Juana Inés de Asbaje—alias Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—died in anonymity. Her grave was unmarked until the 1970s. Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop encapsulates the life, times, and legacy of Sor Juana. In this immersive work, essayist Ilan Stavans provides a biographical and meditative picture of the ways in which popular perceptions of her life and body of work both shape and reflect modern Latinx culture.

A graphic novel about the volatile nature of existence on the fringes of society in Mexico City.

The story of longing and hope in the life of a Jewish boy and his family in 1930s Uruguay.

This is a searching examination of the life, work, and mysterious disappearance of the charismatic civil rights activist Oscar Zeta Acostaa leading figure in the Chicano movement of the 1960s..

Not only do "modern" Jewish languages like Yiddish and Hebrew have their own Jewish writers, but every major Western tongue?from German and Russian to English and Portuguese?does as well. These writers are often at the crossroad between the two traditions: their Jewish one and their own national one. Is there such a thing as a modern Jewish literary tradition, one navigating across linguistic and national lines? If so, how should one define it? Ilan Stavans is uniquely qualified to answer these questions and to comment on the power and challenges of cultural margins and literary crossings. He has been at the forefront of an appreciation of the Jewish literary tradition that is less asphyxiating, more global. His reflections on Jewish Latin America have won him the nickname "pathfinder." This incomparable volume showcases Stavans''s most insightful and provocative?and at times controversial?observations on transnational Jewish culture and literature. Stavans explores the problems and prospects of representing Jewish experiences through such media as Holocaust memoirs and Jewish museums; astutely comments on well-known intellectual figures, including Lionel Trilling, Isaac Babel, Primo Levi, Harold Bloom, and Walter Benjamin; engages in memorable conversations with Norman Manea, Joseph Brodsky, and Ariel Dorfman; and offers compelling glimpses of revelatory moments in his own life.

A dazzling and definitive compendium of the Latino literary tradition.

Natives of the Iberian Peninsula and the twenty countries of Latin America, as well as their kinsfolk who''ve immigrated to the United States and around the world, share a common quality or identity characterized as la hispanidad. Or do they? In this lively, provocative book, two distinguished intellectuals, a cultural critic and a historian, engage in a series of probing conversations in which they try to discern the nature of la hispanidad and debate whether any such shared identity binds the world''s nearly half billion people who are "Hispanic." Their conversations range from La Reconquista and Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who united the Spanish nation while expelling its remaining Moors and Jews, to the fervor for el fútbol (soccer) that has swept much of Latin America today. Along the way, they discuss a series of intriguing topics, including the complicated relationship between Latin America and the United States, Spanish language and the uses of Spanglish, complexities of race and ethnicity, nineteenth-century struggles for nationhood and twentieth-century identity politics, and popular culture from literary novels to telenovelas. Woven throughout are the authors'' own enlightening experiences of crossing borders and cultures in Mexico and Chile and the United States. Sure to provoke animated conversations among its readers, What is la hispanidad? makes a convincing case that "our hispanidad is rooted in a changing tradition, flexible enough to persist beyond boundaries and circumstances. Let us not fix it with a definition, but allow it instead to travel, always."

A celebration of the life and works of one of the most influential world literary figures of the twentieth century, this Very Short Introduction traces Jorge Luis Borges''s trajectory from his beginnings in Buenos Aires through the Dirty War in Argentina. It gives an engaging overview of his writings and their themes and shows how his career redefined Latin American as well as global literature.

Labor leader, social justice advocate, Chicano leader, and humanitarian are only some of the multifaceted renderings of César Chávez. Ilan Stavans has compiled essays and first-person narratives that capture the multiple dimensions of this storied figure. To that end, Stavans''s collection of timely articles separates fact from fiction, or as he puts it the "objective is the opposite of hagiography." Broken into two sections, César Chávez explores a variety of topics central to understanding the actual person instead of a shadowy apparition. The first part, "Considerations" offers critical assessments of Chávez''s life that utilize different approaches to understanding his life, including cultural studies critiques, historical narrative that provide invaluable context, and even eulogies following his untimely death. The second section, "Voices" includes personal reflections on Chávez''s life that explore his religiosity, his role as an "everyman," and the decline of the United Farm Workers union. The title is certain to assist readers in better comprehending this groundbreaking labor leader.

An encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary features lively and informative descriptions of forty-six religious, mythical, and imaginary creatures from the Nahua, Aztec, Maya, Tabasco, Inca, Aymara, and other cultures of Latin America. From the siren-like Acuecuéyotl and the water animal Chaac to the class-conscious Oc and the god of light and darkness Xólotl, the magnificent entities in this volume belong to the same family of real and invented creatures imagined by Dante, Franz Kafka, C. S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and J. K. Rowling. They are mined from indigenous religious texts, like the Popol Vuh, and from chronicles, both real and fictional, of the Spanish conquest by Diego Durán, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and Fernando de Zarzamora, among others. In this playful compilation, Stavans distills imagery from the work of magic realist masters such as Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez; from songs of protest in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru; and from aboriginal beasts in Jewish, Muslim, European, British, and other traditions. In the spirit of imaginative invention, even the bibliography is a mixture of authentic and concocted material. An inspiring record of resistance and memory from a civilization whose superb pantheon of myths never ceases to amaze, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary will delight anyone interested in the history and culture of Latin America.

En tiempos de las redes sociales, la conversacion es un arte en decadencia. A contrapelo de la celeridad contemporanea, Ilan Stavans y Juan Villoro se han servido de internet para dialogar dilatadamente, como lo hubieran hecho en un cafe, explorando su pasion comun por la literatura y las circunstancias en que ocurre. Las diferencias de formacion y el hecho de que los autores se hubiesen frecuentado poco, permitio que el intercambio fuera un sorprendente proceso de conocimiento mutuo.

In its four volumes, 650 entries, 2000 pages and 1.2 million words, Encyclopedia Latina explores every aspect of Latino life in America from a myriad of perspectives, spanning the arts, media, cuisine, government and politics, science and technology, business, health, and sports, among others. While the collection represents an important cultural point of reference and source of pride for Latino youth, it will also serve the interests of an increasingly diverse American population who can all relate to the themes and stories included in this resource.

Most famously depicted as the 300-pound, pill-popping Samoan attorney in Hunter S. Thompson''s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Oscar ''Zeta'' Acosta''s wild, moving first book, originally published in 1972, reveals a man of astonishing variety. A converted Baptist missionary in Panama, bar hopper, psychiatric patient, struggling writer, heartbroken lover, great imposter, connoisseur of excess, Chicano activist, Brown Buffalo - Acosta did it all, then disappeared like a puff of smoke off the coast of Mazatlan, Mexico in the spring of 1974.