I grew up hearing stories about Mexico City from my grandmother, who spent her childhood in the 1930s there after emigrating from the Soviet Union. I fell in love with the city’s neighborhoods during my first visit in 2006, and I am still mesmerized by its scale and its extremes. I am especially interested in the city’s public spaces and the ways people have used them for work and pleasure over the centuries. Those activities often take place in the gray areas of the law, a dynamic I explored in the research for my Ph.D. in History and in my book, Black Market Capital.
This book by Barbara Mundy, an art historian, challenges the idea that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was instantly transformed into Spanish Mexico City following the conquest in 1521. Using indigenous and Spanish maps, Nahua codices, and archaeological evidence, Mundy shows that many aspects of urban life remained in indigenous hands for nearly a century after the Spanish and their indigenous allies toppled Montezuma and his empire. The book is beautifully illustrated, and Mundy’s writing brings the spaces and rhythms of the sixteenth-century city to life.
Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortes and his followers conquered the city. Cortes boasted to…
Julian Simpole is an experienced teacher who worked in a Brighton school which blended talented individual pupils with some who seemed psychopathic contenders for mass murder.
The bigoted and tyrannical Headmaster himself seems hardly more civilised than his more psychotic pupils, and the novice practitioner of the pedagogic arts is buffeted from all sides as he falls in love with a girl he is convinced is a pre-ordained legacy from a previous existence.
Is this book an exposé of early 1980s Stakhanovite teaching, or a nostalgic reminder of comparatively idyllic school life before the current metropolitan street plague of knife-wielding child killers?
The Most Honoured Profession by Julian Simpole. The trials besetting novice teacher Bob Waley are a distillation of
possible events illustrating the problems likely to arise in a large educational establishment such as a comprehensive
school, especially one whose hierarchy is dominated by an insecure bigot, as here, but the novel is actually a love story.
Difficulties at work are ameliorated by the young couple's coup de foudre rapport and mutual sense of having co-existed
in previous lives, Waley strongly believing their meeting in this lifetime to be inevitable, an ordained continuance of past
evolving joy. The thematic strands of…
I’m fascinated by the religious supernatural, especially visions and apparitions. I once saw Mother Teresa levitate – believe me? How do I prove it to you? Religious apparitions have occurred across faith traditions and global regions to all sorts of people. One of the most frequently reported apparitions in history is of the Virgin Mary. Thousands of people have claimed personal visits from the Blessed Mother; since 1830, their numbers have rocketed in America. Only some Marian visions become famous, while others are forgotten. These five enlightening books suggest how and why the Mother of God chooses to be seen, how visionaries explain what they see, and why other people believe.
I live in southern California, where la Señora de Guadalupe appears all around us in bright murals on grocería walls, on t-shirts and jackets, as tattoos, even as dangling air fresheners. According to the earliest legend, included in this volume, she first appeared in 1531 to a peasant named Cuauh-tlahtoa—a.k.a. Juan Diego—on the hill of Tepeyac, at the edge of modern Mexico City.
The site was sacred to Tonantzin (the local name for a mother goddess), but Mary emerged there at dawn in her bright green and red gown amidst a flowerful garden that resembled the paradise of the Aztecs. It took a miracle for Juan Diego to persuade the Archbishop of Mexico City that the Virgin wanted a shrine built on the hill; he turned up at the episcopal palace one December day with his cloak full of out-of-season roses. When he spilled the flowers at the bishop’s feet,…
The devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most important elements in the development of a specifically Mexican tradition of religion and nationality over the centuries. The picture of the Virgen morena (Dark Virgin) is to be found everywhere throughout Mexico, and her iconography is varied almost beyond telling. Though innumerable books, both historical and devotional, have been published on the Guadalupan legend in this century alone, it is only recently that its textual sources have been closely studied.
This volume makes available to the English-reading public an easily accessible translation from the original Nahuatl of the…
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
Writing my history of the 1746 earthquake and tsunami that walloped much of Peru taught me that disasters serve as great entryways into society. They not only provide a snapshot (today's selfie) of where people were and what they were doing at a given moment (think Pompei) but also bring to light and even accentuate social and political tensions. I have lived my adult life between Peru and California and have experienced plenty of earthquakes. I continue to teach on "natural" disasters and have begun a project on the 1600 Huaynaputina volcano that affected the global climate.
This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.
In September 19, 1985, a powerful earthquake hit Mexico City in the early morning hours. As the city collapses, the government fails to respond. Long a voice of social conscience, prominent Mexican journalist, Elena Poniatowska chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit. As a transformative moment in the life of Mexican society, the earthquake is as much a component of the country's current crisis as the 1982 debt crisis, the problematic economic of the last ten years, and the recent elections.…
Climate Studies is a massive, cross-disciplinary field that exceeds the grasp of everyone involved, myself included. I start from my home discipline, philosophy, and follow the leads wherever they take me—a practice I learned from decades as a Freud scholar. The climate books I admire most are those that take this vast literature and synthesize the issues. This means I admire and respect the work being done by smart journalists like McKibben, Klein, and Wallace-Wells, who are perfect jumping-off points to thinking carefully about the future of life today. They are the ‘journalist-philosophers’ who are attempting these essential first drafts of history. Start with them and see where it all leads.
McSweeney’s is a singular publisher of beautifully designed, smart, and unusual books. This one is a collection of writers devoted to imagining the effects of climate change in the near future. Sad, wistful, compelling stories, written from myriad global perspectives and based on climate science. One that has stuck with me is a story called “1740” by Asja Bakic, a Croatian writer. But if you prefer a big, classic novel in the “cli fi” literature, look to the works of Kim Stanley Robinson.
Spanning six continents and nine countries―from metropolitan Mexico City to the crumbling ancient aqueducts of Turkey, the receding coastline of Singapore to the coral shores of northern Australia―McSweeney’s 58 is wholly focused on climate change, with speculative fiction from ten contributors, made in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Global in scope, each story is set in the year 2040 and imagines what the world might look like if the dire warnings issued by the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C were to come true. Using fiction―informed here and there by realism and climate science―this issue…
One of the things I love about reading short story collections is that I can read a story, enjoy it, and then put the collection aside and then read another story later.
This was a short story collection I literally could not put down. As soon as I finished one story, I needed to turn the page and see what the next story had to offer. This collection explores the supernatural lore of Mexico while spanning its history and peering into its near future.
My favorite stories were “Bed of Scorpions” about a brother and sister running a con and “Cemetery Man” about a mad scientist during the Mexican Revolution resurrecting soldiers.
Spanning a variety of genres-fantasy, science fiction, horror-and time periods, Silvia Moreno-Garcia's exceptional debut collection features short stories infused with Mexican folklore yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms as the fantastic erodes the rational. This speculative fiction compilation, lyrical and tender, quirky and cutting, weaves the fantastic and the horrific alongside the touchingly human. Perplexing and absorbing, the stories lift the veil of reality to expose the realms of what lies beyond with creatures that shed their skin and roam the night, vampires in Mexico City that struggle with disenchantment, an apocalypse with giant penguins, legends of magic…
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been drawn to the creepy and kooky world of the Addams Family. I’ve watched every episode of the 1960s sitcom. I fell in love with the 90s films, and when the Netflix adaptation Wednesday aired, I streamed every episode immediately. I’ve written two books based on Wednesday and her family, and I have an upcoming cocktail book with recipes based on gothic literature. My love of horror books and my understanding of the Addams family led me to seek out the perfect list of Wednesday read-alikes.
What terrible tome would Morticia and Gomez have read to little Wednesday in order to ensure that she would have the most noxious nightmares? I believe they would’ve cracked open this gothic children’s classic, written and illustrated by the enigmatic Edward Gorey.
This book recites the alphabet, with each letter representing how a child died. Take, for instance, the representation of our second letter: “B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” What better way for a wicked whelp to learn her letters?
I both chuckled and winced while reading this book, especially with the paired black-and-white illustrations. It’s funny and deeply dark, which is, of course, the perfect mix for an Addams Family fan.
A new, small-format edition of one of Edward Gorey’s “dark masterpieces of surreal morality” (Vanity Fair): a witty, disquieting journey through the alphabet.
I grew up hearing stories about Mexico City from my grandmother, who spent her childhood in the 1930s there after emigrating from the Soviet Union. I fell in love with the city’s neighborhoods during my first visit in 2006, and I am still mesmerized by its scale and its extremes. I am especially interested in the city’s public spaces and the ways people have used them for work and pleasure over the centuries. Those activities often take place in the gray areas of the law, a dynamic I explored in the research for my Ph.D. in History and in my book, Black Market Capital.
Few scholars have done more to demystify the nature of crime in Mexico than Pablo Piccato. His book City of Suspectsis a nuanced history that reveals that the very meaning of crime was contested in early twentieth-century Mexico City. While Mexican elites tried to define criminals as a social class, the urban poor, who experienced crime as a part of their everyday lives, saw crime as an individual phenomenon. This book, like the others on this list, is also a story about the ways people used and thought about public space. At a time when Mexico’s government sought to transform the capital into a modern metropolis along the lines of Paris or New York, the poor resisted efforts to exclude them from that future.
In City of Suspects Pablo Piccato explores the multiple dimensions of crime in early-twentieth-century Mexico City. Basing his research on previously untapped judicial sources, prisoners' letters, criminological studies, quantitative data, newspapers, and political archives, Piccato examines the paradoxes of repressive policies toward crime, the impact of social rebellion on patterns of common crime, and the role of urban communities in dealing with transgression on the margins of the judical system. By investigating postrevolutionary examples of corruption and organized crime, Piccato shines light on the historical foundations of a social problem that remains the main concern of Mexico City today. Emphasizing…
Hello! My name is Flavia Z. Drago and I'm a Mexican picturebook maker currently living with my partner and my cat in the UK. As a child, most of the books that I read came from foreign countries, particularly Europe and the US, and these have had a huge influence on my work as an author and illustrator. However, now that I'm in charge of making the books that I would have liked as a child, I enjoy adding details of my Mexican culture whenever possible. To some extent, the books that I've shared with you collect some of the stories, experiences, and emotions that as a Mexican have impacted my life.
As a Mexican living in the UK, this story deeply speaks to me, as I truly identify with the characters in Tania’s book. This story reminded me of all of the complicated emotions of migrating, the things that I miss when I am not in Mexico, while reminding me of appreciating the present even more, as there are always things to appreciate, enjoy, and love wherever you are.
The illustrations of Tania are full of life, delicate, and convey in amazing detail the lively atmospheres of Mexico City and New York; the city where she was born, and the city where she currently lives.
As a girl in Mexico City and a boy in New York City ponder moving to each other’s locale, it becomes clear that the two cities — and the two children — are more alike than they might think.
But I’m not sure I want to leave my home. I’m going to miss so much.
Moving to a new city can be exciting. But what if your new home isn’t anything like your old home? Will you make friends? What will you eat? Where will you play? In a cleverly combined voice — accompanied by wonderfully detailed illustrations depicting parallel…
Growing up Jewish, third-generation in Latin America has given me a strong identity and a unique lens living as a double-minority. My entire life, I’ve been fascinated by life’s deep questions, the arts, and metaphysics. When no college major was clicking, I decided to pursue a B.A. in philosophy and comparative religion to better get to know my own faith and search for a universal truth across all world religions and cultures. It was in my college poetry class, where I first started writing as an outlet for my thoughts and many of the poems in my book were written then and reworked over the next two decades.
The first science fiction book I ever read was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. This book began my lifelong passion for watching sci-fi movies and reading books. It wasn’t until the end of high school that I would discover The Law of Love by Laura Esquivel, an epic novel that combines romance, spirituality, and science fiction.
The story weaves eternal themes of love, destiny, reincarnation, and human interconnectedness juxtaposed against a futuristic society where time and space travel, telepathy, and access to the mystical Akashic records (every person’s thoughts, emotions, experiences, and actions) are accessible to all.
While the author’s book Like Water for Chocolate received widespread attention and a Hollywood movie adaptation, it was The Law of Love that to this day shapes my romantic ideals and titillates my sci-fi and philosophical curiosities.
The greatly anticipated new work from the author of the international bestseller Like Water for Chocolate tells a cosmic love story, a Mexican Midsummer Night's Dream that stretches from the fall of Montezuma's Mexico to the 23rd century. By including the music that so perfectly accompanies the story, this audio weaves and enchanting and enveloping spell that will absorb listeners in ways no novel ever has before. Simultaneous hardcover release from Crown. 4 cassettes.
