I feel passionate about spreading the word about all the fantastic children’s literature set in South America. As an author and a multilingual mom whose son enjoys learning about his Latin American heritage, I’ve always brought home stacks of picture books—in Spanish and English—that celebrate Latin American cultures and settings. I’ve loved traveling to the Andes mountains and the Amazon rain forest as part of my children’s book collaborations with Indigenous women in those regions. Most of all, I love transporting young readers to these inspiring places through story.
The vibrant, colorful cut-out style mosaic artwork first caught my eye—it creates a jubilant sensory experience.
In poignant observations, the author recounts what he saw as a boy from his window, in his favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Although favelas might have problems with lack of services and violence, this story is a celebration of the creative spirit of the favela, where Brazilian funk was born, and where future soccer super-stars hone their skills.
This is a poignant glimpse into the poetry of people’s lives in the favela, and it captivated me completely.
What do you see from your window? This #OwnVoices picture book from Brazil offers a first-hand view of what children growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janiero see everyday. A vibrant and diverse celebration of urban community living, brought to life by unique, colorful illustrations that juxtapose brick buildings with lush jungle plants.
I am a philologist with a passion for Atlantic cultural history. What started with a research project on the African-American Pinkster tradition and the African community in seventeenth-century Dutch Manhattan led me to New Orleans’ Congo Square and has meanwhile expanded to the African Atlantic islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With fluency in several foreign languages, I have tried to demonstrate in my publications that we can achieve a better understanding of Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas by adopting a multilingual and Atlantic perspective.
In this fascinating study, Chasteen examines the historical experiences that molded Latin American popular dance from an Atlantic perspective. It delves into the “deep” history of Latin American culture and analyzes the development of dancing culture in its socio-historical context. This is not only a well-researched, but also a well written and oftentimes funny book that is broadly accessible. It is a must-read for any new scholar interested in the field of Black performance culture. Although the focus is on Latin America, Chasteen’s study reveals connections that are also of great importance to understanding the historical development of Black dance culture in North America.
When John Charles Chasteen learned that Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, danced on a banquet table to celebrate Latin American independence in 1824, he tried to visualise the scene. How, he wondered, did the Liberator dance? Did he bounce stiffly in his dress uniform? Or did he move his hips? In other words, how high had African dance influences reached in Latin American societies? A vast social gap separated Bolivar from people of African descent; however, Chasteen's research shows that popular culture could bridge the gap. Fast-paced and often funny, this book explores the history of Latin American popular dance before…
I know small spaces from first-hand experience. As a writer based in New York City, I have lived in a series of impossibly small spaces, including a 6’ x 8’ bedroom in an apartment with no living room and a teeny-tiny studio that was made livable by installing a Murphy bed.
Today I live in less than 700 square feet with my husband and son. When I set out to write my own book, I wanted to inspire readers to make the most of their own small homes and discover the freedom that living small provides. I have an extensive personal library of books about small-space design, but these five are my all-time favorites.
There are dozens of small-space books that I could have chosen for decor inspiration, but this one from Monocle is a personal favorite, in part because the photos, while gorgeous, are not overly styled. It features homes from around the world, including many in Europe, and most are primary residences, not guest houses or weekend homes that often fill small-space books. Much like the magazine, this book opens with several thoughtful essays on what it means to live in a “cosy” space. With its linen cover and hefty size, it would make a great housewarming gift for anyone living in a small space.
This Monocle book tells us how to turn a house into a home. Both a practical guide and a great source of inspiration, The Monocle Guide to Cosy Homes presents the interiors, furniture, and locations you need to know about along with portraits of the people who can make it happen. The Monocle Guide to Cosy Homes celebrates the durable and the meaningful through a collection of homes that tell a story. Most architecture and interior books show houses polished to perfection, manicured to the extent that it is hard to imagine anybody acually lives there: they seem to miss…
I grew up in Tanzania, where I discovered the importance of learning first-hand from ordinary people about their lives by accompanying my mother, who was an anthropologist, when she carried out participant observation among coastal people. Much later in my own research, I could see how essential it was to interact with people face-to-face and learn about their aspirations, joys, fears, daily struggles, and creative ways of coping with the challenges of an economy in free fall. I learned to look beyond the “economic data” to more fully appreciate the humanity of the people involved. All of these books I selected are by people who learned about the real urban economy in this way.
Drawing on her first-hand experience of living in a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Perlman powerfully upends many existing myths about the urban poor as marginal in this classic work.
This book, which inspired me to look beyond the economic models at how people actually live, shows how shantytown dwellers are integrated into society, but in a way that exploits and oppresses them economically and politically.
They are not socially and culturally marginal, but rather they are stigmatized and excluded from a closed social system that is radically unequal.
They are socially well-organized and cohesive; they aspire to educate their children and improve the quality of their homes; they work hard and take pride in a job well done. They are aware of and involved in those aspects of politics that affect their lives.
After flirting with careers as an archaeologist, pilot, concert pianist, and diplomat, I settled on photographer after just a few month’s residence in Heidelberg, Germany, while studying for my Masters in Comparative Literature. The camera provided close personal interaction with people, while hearing their stories from a wide variety of cultural perspectives and social environments. Introduced by parents, I formed an obsession with opera, Native American drum music, vinyl recordings, and historic places, particularly Georgia O’Keeffe country, “south of the border” from our Colorado base. My family of musicians and artists stopped, listened, and loved the light and land of the Four Corners. I self-define as a photojournalist-poet, a griot.
It’s a huge book! Huge in size, huge in the image reproductions, huge in the photographic artist’s effort to construct composite images of dramatic international scenes from many iconic places, such as Times Square, Paris, Rome, National Parks of the World, that transform from day to night.
Yes, all in the same image! One side is night that slowly across the image melds into day. Technological marvel, but no kitsch here. Hundreds of hours, thousands of images layered together to create an entirely new art form.
If you were to stand in one spot at an iconic location for 30 hours and simply observe, never closing your eyes, you still wouldn't be able to take in all the detail and emotion found in a Stephen Wilkes panoramic photograph. Not only does Wilkes shoot over 1,500 exposures from a fixed angle, he also distills this visual information afterward in his studio, painstakingly composing selected frames into a single image.
Day to Night presents 60 epic panoramas created between 2009 and 2018, shot everywhere from Africa's Serengeti to the Champs-Elysees in Paris, from the Grand Canyon to Coney…
I read all kinds of novels, but I’m fascinated by the true story in history since truth is so much stranger than fiction – you just couldn’t make anything up that is equally amazing. The stories of real individuals in history tell us so much about how human nature changes, and remains the same, over time. I read my first historical novels as a teenager when there wasn’t a YA fiction as such, and books by Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton taught me how to enter into history rather than just learning facts. I’ve been hooked ever since! It was a hard job to make this selection, but I hope you love the books on my list as much as I do!
An unusual one, this collection of short stories and historical fiction rarely appear in short form. But actually, I was just blown away by the writing! The first story, "Death of the Pugilist" is magnificent, and hard-hitting, if you’ll excuse another terrible pun, but the second, about Alfred Russel Wallace, is both exquisite and exquisitely painful. For those of you who are wondering who Alfred Russel Wallace was, he was a naturalist and explorer, whose contributions allowed Darwin to develop his theory of natural selection and evolution. Obviously, most of the credit has been given to Darwin for this world-changing theory while Wallace, who did not have Darwin’s social standing, remains overlooked, in one of those twists of history that speaks volumes about what is commemorated and what is not. Mason’s wonderful story implicitly questions the historical record, and by implication, history itself.
** Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2021**
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner comes a collection of interlacing tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world.
On a fated flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most…
When I was twelve, my family moved to Brazil for a year because of my father’s work. I’ve been fascinated by the country and it has been always been the focal point of my research. Initially, my focus was how neighborhood associations in Rio’s favelas took advantage of new political opportunities during the transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s, however, the neighborhoods had all been occupied by heavily armed and occasionally violent drug gangs. Since then, I've tried to figure out the dynamics of this process, from the involved actors’ points of view. Including the voices of participants in drug gang life and those, like Bruno, who bring drugs to market.
Luiz Eduardo Soares is a Brazilian anthropologist who served as the Coordinator of Public Safety in Rio de Janeiro in 1999 and the National Secretary of Public Security in 2003. As a consequence, he has a unique and very personal take on the relationship between poverty, drugs, and violence, and drugs at the local and country level. This book offers the reader a series of engaging essays on Soares’ experiences in office, revealing the near impossibility of reforming the system in the face of endemic corruption and a culture of violence in the public sphere. It is a great read!
A book as rich and sprawling as the seductive metropolis it evokes, Rio de Janeiro builds a kaleidoscopic portrait of this city of extremes, and its history of conflict and corruption. Award-winning novelist, ex-government minister and sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares tells the story of Rio through the everyday lives of its people: gangsters and police, activists, politicians and struggling migrant workers, each with their own version of the city. Taking us on a journey into Rio's intricate world of favelas, beaches and corridors of power, Soares reveals one of the most extraordinary cities in the world in all its seething,…
When I was twelve, my family moved to Brazil for a year because of my father’s work. I’ve been fascinated by the country and it has been always been the focal point of my research. Initially, my focus was how neighborhood associations in Rio’s favelas took advantage of new political opportunities during the transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s, however, the neighborhoods had all been occupied by heavily armed and occasionally violent drug gangs. Since then, I've tried to figure out the dynamics of this process, from the involved actors’ points of view. Including the voices of participants in drug gang life and those, like Bruno, who bring drugs to market.
Based on meticulous and ground-breaking research, this book examines the roles played by children and adolescents in the drug trade in Rio de Janeiro. The author and his team interviewed twenty-five young men involved with the drug trade, plus various other local actors. The testimonies reveal that the participation of children and adolescents is a function of a thriving drug market, the absence of alternative opportunities, and the corrupt and repressive nature of local security forces. I know of no other book with such unparalleled access to child combatants in Rio’s favelas.
All my life, I’ve been fascinated by interest-driven people and the subcultures they discover or form around themselves. Though my writing ranges from mainstream literary work to music criticism to speculative fiction in many different flavors, I’m best known for what one longtime reader referred to as my “oddly personable brand of horror.” Call them people-and-their-ghosts stories. I’ve written six novels and four collections, which have earned me the Shirley Jackson and International Horror Guild Awards, among other honors. I’ve also taught writing at the graduate, university, and secondary level for more than 25 years.
Emma, the bored and restless translator into English of the works of a reclusive, once-celebrated Brazilian author, learns that the author has disappeared. On impulse, and uninvited, Emma ducks out of her Pittsburgh life and a relationship she has tired of, jets off to Brazil, and insinuates herself into the ongoing investigation into what has happened. Less a detective story than a constantly unfolding act of decoding—like Helene Hanff, Emma seems to have an easier time coaxing layered meaning out of words than interpreting gestures or interactions with actual people—Ways to Disappearis packed with doubts about humanity but soul-deep love of books, Brazil, and the process of translation. (Novey herself has translated the brilliant and enigmatic Clarice Lispector.) This being 21st Century American lit, the relationships that form feel less stable, healthy, and sustainable. And yet, in indulging her fascination with the mysteries of other places…
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
NPR Best Book of 2016 Buzzfeed Best Debut of 2016 BUST Magazine Best Book of 2016
Winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize for Fiction
New York Times Editors' Choice
2016 Barnes & Noble Discover selection
"An elegant page-turner....Charges forward with the momentum of a bullet." --New York Times Book Review
For fans of Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, an inventive, brilliant debut novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist…
I am an author, illustrator, and award-winning creative director. I have loved to draw and make things since a young age, mostly wacky contraptions (inspired by my love of the Hanna-Barbera Wacky Races cartoons). I’m also passionate about mazes, having spent many family holidays drawing mazes on a small whiteboard for my two boys to complete.
Here’s another maze book by Usborne, Around the World Mazes by Sam Smith (as I mentioned previously, Usborne publishes great children’s books!). Unlike The Big Maze book this book has an overarching theme linking all the mazes, ‘places around the world’, also, each maze covers the entire double-page spread, so there are fewer mazes but with greater visual impact. While the delightfully illustrated mazes will appeal more to younger children, they do playfully bring to life the different locations they depict, whether that be the Australian Outback or coast of Vancouver, and so provide educational content along with oodles of fun!
Travel from the Amazon and the Antarctic to the Himalayas and Hollywood with this entertaining selection of mazes from across the globe. Each maze is more challenging than the last, from taking a ramble in Rio de Janeiro to touring the Norwegian fjiords or finding your way in a Moroccan market. All the answers are at the back of the book.
