Bøker av Ilan Stavans

An irreverent and kaleidoscopic cartoon history of Latino life, culture, and politics, now revised and updated for its twenty-fifth anniversary In Latino USA, Latin American and Latino scholar Ilan Stavans captures the joys, nuances, and multiple dimensions of Latino culture within the context of the English language. Combining the solemnity of so-called serious literature and history with the inherently theatrical and humorous form of comics, this cartoon history of Latinos includes Columbus, the Alamo, Desi Arnaz, West Side Story, Castro, Guevara, the Bay of Pigs, Neruda, the Mariel boatlift, Selena, Sonia Sotomayor, and much more.     To embrace the sweep of Hispanic civilization and its riot of types, archetypes, and stereotypes, Stavans deploys a series of “cliché figurines” as narrators, including a toucan (displayed regularly in books by García Márquez, Allende, and others), the beloved Latino comedian Cantinflas, a masked wrestler, and Captain America. Their multiple, at times contradictory voices provide unique perspectives on Latino history, together creating a carnivalesque epic, democratic and impartial.    Updated to bring the book up to the present moment, this twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes thirty new pages of Latino history, from Hamilton to George Santos. Latino USA, like the history it so entertainingly relates, is a treasure trove of irreverence, wit, subversion, anarchy, politics, humanism, and celebration.

This collection presents a series of autobiographical meditations by Ilan Stavans on how language defines every aspect of our life.

A comprehensive, multi-lingual anthology of 20th-century Latin American Poetry in both Spanish and Portuguese.During a century of extraordinary change, poets became the chroniclers of deep polarizations. From Rubén Darío's quest to renew the Spanish language to César Vallejo's linking of religion and politics, from Jorge Luis Borges's cosmopolitanism to Pablo Neruda's placement of poetry as uncompromising speaker for the downtrodden, and from Alejandra Pizarnik's agonies of the self to Humberto Ak'abal's examination of all things indigenous, it is through verse that the hemisphere's cantankerous collective soul in an age of overhaul might best be understood. A brilliant, moving, and thought-provoking summation of these forking paths, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry invites us to look at an illustrious literary tradition with fresh eyes. Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost scholars of Hispanic culture and a distinguished translator, goes beyond easy geographical and linguistic categorizations. This bilingual anthology features eighty-four authors from sixteen different countries writing in Spanish, Portuguese, Mapuche, Nahuatl, Quechua, Mazatec, Zapotec, Ladino, and Spanglish. The poems are rendered into English in inspired fashion by first-rate translators such as Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur. In these pages the reader will experience the power of poetry to account for a hundred years in the life of a restless continent.

"This volume is a people's history of English in the United States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers, immigrants, journalists, poets, dictionary makers, actors, musicians, playwrights, preachers, presidents, rappers, translators, singers, children's authors, scientists, politicians, foreigners, students, homemakers, lexicographers, scholars, newspaper columnists, senators, novelists, and a slew of fanatics. It begins with the English used by the settlers in Plymouth Colony and concludes (for now) with John McWhorter's tribute to punctuation that bends the rules. The quest is to understand how an imperial language like English, with Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came to be an intrinsic component of the most influential democratic experiment in the world. Edited by internationally renowned cultural commentator and consultant for the OED Ilan Stavans, it is organized chronologically and offers a banquet of letters, poems, essays, dictionary entries, stories, songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation. Immigrants have propelled these transformations. Hybrid dialects like Yinglish, Spanglish, and Hawaiian pidgin have flowered. Our linguistic and cultural multiplicity has sparked fierce national debates that play out in these pages--from the compulsory education (and deracination) of Native Americans, to the classification of Black Vernacular English (once celebrated and ridiculed as Ebonics), to the dictionary wars over prescriptive versus descriptive usage, to the push for "English only" mandates that persist to this day. What is clear is that as much as we try to corral it, American English gallops ahead to its own destiny. Driven by American innovators, English has become the global language of both business and entertainment--the medium of the laws that bind us, the art that inspires us, and the connections we forge across cultures. A compendium that is as rich and diverse as the country itself, The People's Tongue helps us grapple with how English has become the world's lingua franca."--

2020 Foreword INDIES Gold Winner for Multicultural Fiction2020 Mass Book Awards Must Read FictionAn 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.

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need.World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2020

Ilan Stavans is one of the best known and most prolific Latino academics working today. In preparation for writing Seventh Heaven, Stavans spent five years traveling through Latin America in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region.

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.

A book-length conversation between two leading scholars on the themes and questions of Hispanic popular culture

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.

Offers a poetic exploration - across time, space, and language, real as well as metaphorical - of the US-Mexican wall dividing the two civilizations, of similar walls (Jerusalem, China, Berlin, Warsaw) in history, and of the act of separating people by ideology, class, race, and other subterfuges.

This long-awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of Garcia Marquez's life up to the publication of his classic 100 Years of Solitude.

Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison's Reclaiming Travel is a provocative meditation on the meaning of travel in the twenty-first century. Eschewing tourism, Stavans and Ellison urge for a rethinking of contemporary travel in order to return it to its roots as a tool for self-discovery and transformation.

Noted cultural critic Ilan Stavans and artist ADAL analyze the selfie and its role in contemporary life by exploring it in the context of the history of Western self-portraiture, mythology, literature, art, and philosophy.

Shares interests in the intersection of art and ideas. This book takes thirteen pieces of Latino art, each reproduced in color, as occasions for thematic discussions.

Stavans interweaves his own experience with that of other Jewish writers and thinkers to explore modern Jewish culture across the boundaries of language and nation

Our understanding of love is not the same as the one espoused by Plato in the fourth century BCE. Nor is it the same as the courtly love of the Renaissance, or love as defined by Stendhal or Proust or Freud. Here, cultural critic Ilan Stavans engages in a dialogue with Veronica Albin about love and its various manifestations.

Inspired by a stirring e-mail exchange with his father, award-winning essayist and cultural commentator , Ilan Stavans decided to do something bizarre: revisit his hometown, Mexico City, accompanied by a tour guide.  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. Return to Centro Histórico makes it possible for readers to understand the intimate role that Jews have played in the devleopment of Hispanic civilzation.

Ilan Stavans has been described by the ""Washington Post"" as 'Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast'. This collection of essays focuses on his Jewish heritage and Hispanic upbringing and the relationship between the two cultures from both his own personal experience and that of others.

In a series of lively, provocative conversations, two prominent intellectuals debate the nature of "Hispanic-ness" as it has been expressed in Hispanic civilization around the world and across the centuries.

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? This volume explores the problems and prospects of representing Jewish experiences through such media as Holocaust memoirs and Jewish museums.

Collects the challenging and stimulating writing of Ilan Stavans into one essential volume, examining the voice of the Spanish-speaking cultures in the US.