Books about Stavans from Amazon.com

The most comprehensive English-language collection of work ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez)

"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness " So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."

This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.
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The Americas, Ilan Stavans, Series Editor

€ Winner of a 1982 Los Angeles Times Book Prize € Selected by the New York Times for "Books of the Century" With a new introduction by Ilan Stavans and a new foreword by Arthur Miller..
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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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Born in Mexico in 1648, Latin America's finest baroque poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz spent her entire adult life in a convent This unique dual-language collection of her works includes a famous prose piece that offers fascinating insights into the poet and the world in which she lived. Remarkable for her time, Sor Juana discusses the position of women with astonishing frankness, irony, and thinly veiled anger, issues that continue to be of concern today. How far, yet how little we have come in 300 years..
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Written in political exile by one of Argentina's greatest statesmen and intellectuals, this work is ostensibly a biography of the gaucho "barbarian" Juan Facundo Quiroga. It is also a complex and passionate investigation of the dialectic of civilization and barbarism. Sarmiento explores the impact of Argentinian geography on the life of the gaucho, chronicles the upbringing and the often bloody political and military adventures of Facundo, and examines the reign of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the tyrannical ruler of Argentina at the time of Sarmiento's writing..
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Hailed as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution,The Underdogsrecounts the story of an illiterate but charismatic Indian peasant farmer’s part in the rebellion against Porfirio Díaz, and his subsequent loss of belief in the cause when the revolutionary alliance becomes factionalized. Azuela’s masterpiece is a timeless, authentic portrayal of peasant life, revolutionary zeal, and political disillusionment..
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From the mean streets of the barrio to the house on Mango Street, from the Mambo Kings to the Garcia Girls, the authors who contribute to this volume transport us across geographies and through cultures in an attempt to articulate the joys, struggles, defeats, and triumphs of the Latino experience in the United States. Growing Up Latino offers, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of classic and recent Latino writing in English, converging in sometimes shocking, often funny, and always stirring memoirs and stories. Religion, sex, love, language, and family are some of the topics explored in this compelling anthology of fiction and nonfiction. With its laughter and tears, its beauty and power, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book and an unforgettable contribution to the Latino tradition of letters. This diverse collection shatters the myth of a singular U.S.- Latino experience, proving the existence of a rich tradition whose writers, active for more than forty years, are only now being recognized by a rapidly growing audience..
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A pastime, delightful—
Chips, cards, and a table.
The riddles insightful,
the future, unstable! What is it? It's Lotería, the Mexican game of chance! For the uninitiated, it might seem like bingo played with a riddling tarot deck. But this enthralling board game is more than entertainment. The images found on its cards—La Virgen, El Pan Dulce, La Telenovela—are miniature reflections of an entire culture, capturing the joys and sorrows of the Mexican people. Wildly popular on both sides of the border, Lotería cards originated in the Iberian peninsula in the eighteenth century but have been redesigned so many times as to defy expectation, with boards devoted to ecclesiastical figures, soccer idols, and even vaudeville starlets. With the dawn of a new millennium, American artist Teresa Villegas created a new Lotería set that is already gaining popularity in Mexico, and her striking images are also widely exhibited in galleries across the United States. This gift book, which will bring pleasure and bewilderment to children and adults alike, reproduces more than two dozen of Villegas's 54 colorful cards, pairing them with insightful, humorous riddles written by award-winning author Ilan Stavans. Stavans also revisits his childhood in an essay that examines the role of luck in Mexican life and recreates the sort of poetry jam that often accompanies Lotería contests wherever they might take place. Delve into the emblematic pages of this marvelous volume to find your own Calavera. Let yourself unravel the paths of El Deseo and the mysteries of El Corazón. Before too long, you'll realize that luck is never truly accidental—for a turn at ¡Lotería! is always an opportunity to come face to face with El Destino..
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In this remarkably wide-ranging anthology, Ilan Stavans has collected the work of more than fifty notable Jewish writers from around the globe, weaving these diverse viewpoints and voices into a rich portrait of Jewish literary tradition.

The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories takes us from the mid-1800s right up to the present, encompassing the full spectrum of Jewish writing around the world. The variety of tales captured here is stunning. Readers will find stories such as "A Yom Kippur Scandal" by Sholem Aleichem, the father of Yiddish literature; "Before the Law" by Franz Kafka; "Looking for Mr. Green" by Saul Bellow; "The Spinoza of Market Street" by Isaac Bashevis Singer; and "Midrash on Happiness" by Grace Paley. Stavans has included many pieces by Americans, including such markedly different writers as Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, Moacyr Seliar, Stanley Elkin, Delmore Schwartz, Dan Jacobson, Francine Prose, Allegra Goodman, and Philip Roth. And here too are pieces from around the globe, by writers no less varied: Isaac Babel, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, Elias Canetti, Amos Oz, and Danilo Kis. What emerges in the end is proof of an observation by Ba'al Makshoves--that the Jews may have many languages and a dozen echoes in foreign tongues, but only one literature. And it is one of the finest in the world.

The many marvelous tales that fill The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories affirm that a shared identity can exist without sterile uniformity--and that writers can engage their religious and cultural heritage without losing touch with those rich, complex ambiguities that inhabit the heart..
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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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