When schoolteacher Kate Borrow arrives at the English country district of Kinning, she hardly suspects the dark secrets that will draw her under their spell, even when a young girl disappears suddenly

Product Description: Explores Borges's infatuation with Jewish history and culture. In this volume, award-winning cultural critic and controversial public intellectual llan Stavans focuses his attention on Jorge Luis Borges's fascination with Jewish culture...read more

Product Description: An interweaving of longing and reemergence   Originally published in Spanish in 2000 and first appearing in English in 2004, The Letters that Never Came is an autobiographical novel in three parts that reflects Rosencof’s life growing up in 1930s Uruguay as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and, later, his twelve-year imprisonment during the military dictatorship his country suffered...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

From one of our foremost cultural critics comes a provocative collection of essays on politics and popular culture in Mexico and the Hispanic community in the United States. Ilan Stavans examines the delightful if torturous relationship between a Europeanized elite and the hybrid masses in a continent he sees as imprisoned in the labyrinth of identity. In "Santa Selena," for example, Stavans explores the beatification of the martyred Tejana singer in the context of American pop iconography. Similarly, Stavans's portraits of Jose Guadalupe Posada, Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, Sandra Cisneros, Cantinflas, and Carlos Fuentes are less about these luminaries than about what people have turned them into. His search is not for the idol but for the idolater, and for ways in which technology and the media refurbish reality. This theme is nowhere more tangible than in the essay on Subcomandante Marcos as a postmodern incarnation of Che Guevara and Abimael Guzman, a mythical guerrillero whose best weapons were not the bayonet and hand grenade but the fax machine and e-mail.

Product Description: 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...read more