Ilan Stavans

Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans, PhD

Verónica Albin

Surprising readers again and again, cultural critic Ilan Stavans creates a dialogue with Vernica Albin to explore love in its many variations.

Love & Language

Presents an anthology of the short stories of twenty-three young Latino writers, representing the best of contemporary Latino fiction

Young Latino Writers

New World

The whole of The Catcher in the Rye is in the Oxford English Dictionary, waiting to be unscrambled, and so are all the novels of our past, present, and immediate future en·thu·si·ast Function: noun : a person filled with enthusiasm : as a: one who is ardently attached to a cause, object, or pursuit b: one who tends to become ardently absorbed in an interest A dictionary, despite its heroic effort to pin down language, is destined for failure the moment a single word is printed; language, with its eternal mutations, is forever uncontainable. In Dictionary Days, award-winning essayist Ilan Stavans explores our very human need to “seize upon the meaning of a word.” Owner of hundreds of dictionaries, he follows a fascinating, zigzagging history of lexicography across many languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Cyrillic. Throughout his journey, Stavans spots strange meaning inconsistencies, uncovers unusual origins, and shares extraordinary and often hilarious anecdotes. With a dazzling knowledge of dictionaries through the ages, matched by a lively wit, Stavans reaches far beyond the margin of the page and pays a worthy tribute to a discipline that is at once inspiring and maddening. “For dictionaries are oracles: nothing is outside them—except the impossible.”

Dictionary Days

This study of of the short fiction by Julio Cortazar - ten collections in all - is considered here as a part of the enormous body of Latin American literature which began to be discovered in this country in the 1960s. By showing the reader Cortazar's relation to other writers in this genre Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Borges, and others, the author provides a platform for critical exploration into Cortazar's work.

A Study of the Short Fiction

Julio Cortázar

Ilan Stavans, author Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language and Dictionary Days

Presentation of the author's psychoanalytic beliefs and experiences inchild psychoanalytic therapy.

Mexico and Its Detective Novel

Antiheroes

I South reading North -- II North reading South.

Writers from the Americas Reading One Another

Mutual Impressions

Ilan Stavans's vast and subtle knowledge deftly emerges in this engrossing collection of essays. Fascinated by the idea of Western civilization as a sequence of innumerable misinterpretations and misrepresentations, a magisterial Tower of Babel where everybody communicates at once in a different tongue, these nineteen pieces cover a broad range of personal and philosophical topics with the unifying theme being the crossroads where politics and the imagination meet. An essay on linguistics and culture discusses the shaping of Latin America's collective identity as a result of a translation loss. Peru's modern history is approached as a bloody battle between enlightenment and darkness, as personified by the archetypal clash between novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and the leader of Shining Path, Abimael Guzman. In his critiques of Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stavans reflects on the dichotomy between pen and sword in the Hispanic world and wonders why we are so mesmerized by magic realism, a literary style that poses as unsettling while remaining thoroughly conventional at heart. In "Letter to a German Friend," Stavans returns to his fate as a Jew in the Southern Hemisphere, and in "The First Book," he connects his passion for literature to his initiation into Jewishness. Finally, in the brilliant meditation on Columbus's afterlife, he reflects on the many ways in which we reinvent ourselves in order to make sense of the chaotic world that surrounds us.

Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans, PhD

About

Books

Join the club