My book club rescued this classic Mexican novel from my TBR pile, where it had languished far too long.
I am grateful because when I finally read it, I found Pedro Páramo bewitching. On her deathbed, a mother commands her son to return to their original village to find his father. Everyone he meets there is dead, and the dead have stories to tell.
When Pedro Páramo was first published in 1955, readers didn’t know what to think of this precursor to magical realism, but then it caught on in a big way. Gabriel García Márquez claimed he could recite the entire novella.
A new movie version starring Tenoch Huerta Mejía from Wakanda Forever will be out soon. You’ll want to read the book before seeing the film.
Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003 Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists-writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Paramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed-Susana San…
I found this treasure in my local little free library in Colonia Guadalupe, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and devoured it. In 1935, when he was barely out of his teens, Edmond Charlot launched in Algiers a combination bookstore, lending library, and publishing house that became incredibly influential.
Charlot often had to work on a shoestring budget, and he survived wars and persecutions by French colonial authorities, but for the love of books and writers, he never gave up. How can we, as readers and authors, not love this guy in return?
Kaouther Adimi tells much of the story through journal entries, a construct I don’t always enjoy but in this case found compelling. I look forward to reading more of her evocative work.
Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto "by the young, for the young," discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.…
Discussing Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with my book club was a revealing experience.
Among our members are Mexicans who have lived in the U.S. and Europe as well as Americans with Cuban, Trinidadian, and European roots currently choosing to live in Mexico. Our immigration stories span the gamut of privilege, and yet we all connected with certain aspects of this book.
With her nuanced portrayal of racism on three continents, the author made us reflect and squirm even as all of us grew ever more enthralled with the story. Adichie is a rare talent.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria. Self-assured Ifemelu heads for America. But quiet, thoughtful Obinze finds post-9/11 America closed to him, and plunges into a dangerous undocumented life in London.
Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria,…
A 2023 International Book Awards Finalist for Women’s Fiction, The Broken Hummingbird wrestles with marital dissolution and cultural dissonance, following a woman’s struggle to truly know her new country and her own heart. Jane—mother, lawyer, enthusiastic expat, and fatally unhappy wife—sets out to help two little girls but must also save herself and her own sons while navigating the parallel worlds of wealth and poverty in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
