Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of the NEPR podcast In Contrast. He has written Quixote: The Novel and the World (2015), Oy, Caramba!: An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America (2016), Borges, the Jew (2017), and The Wall (2018). He has recently written The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America (Pittsburgh), and his book-long poem “The Wall” (also Pittsburgh) won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
After the Expulsion: An Excerpt from “Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction”
Ilan Stavans explores Sephardic literature in this excerpt from “Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction.”...
Can Literature Teach Us How to Die?: A Conversation Between Ilan Stavans and Priyanka Champaneri
What can literature teach us about our inevitable trip to “the undiscovered country”?...
On Packing Up My Library
How a scholar built a world-class Latin American Judaica collection, and then shipped it away....
Translation and Hallucination
Ilan Stavans’s Selected Translations: 2000-2020 appears today from the University of Pittsburgh Press. ¤ Translation is liberation. Words caught in ...
The Fallacy of American Studies: A Conversation
On xenolinguaphobia and the provincialism of American Studies....
On Fear
In Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, a pandemic sweeping the globe deprives people of sight. It simply happens; no explanation is ...
The Old in the New: Introducing “How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish”
Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert introduce their new anthology, “How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish.”...
Bongo Explosion: The Rebellious Dimension of Latin Music
Ilan Stavans and Alex Nava discuss the rhythmic, political, and spiritual dimensions of Latin American music....
The Thief: On the Rediscovery of Luis de Carvajal the Younger’s Memoir
Ilan Stavans narrates the rediscovery of Luis de Carvajal the Younger’s long-lost memoir....
Mario Santiago: Infrarrealist and Terrorist
Ilan Stavans introduces “Poetry Comes out of My Mouth,” a collection of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s poems translated by Arturo Mantecón....
On Jealousy: A Conversation Between Ilan Stavans and Max Page
Ilan Stavans and Max Page discuss the perils and virtues of jealousy....
The Ghost of Piglia: A Conversation with Emilio Renzi
Ilan Stavans interviews Emilio Renzi, the alter ego of his late friend, Argentine novelist Ricardo Piglia....
Disincarnation of the World: On Octavio Paz’s “The Monkey Grammarian”
Ilan Stavans introduces a new edition of Nobel Prize–winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s “The Monkey Grammarian” (1974)....
I Love My Selfie: An Essay
Cultural critic Ilan Stavans contemplates the selfie....
El Boom and Its Aftershocks in the Global Marketplace
Ilan Stavans traces the rise of Latin American fiction as a global phenomenon....
On Self-Translation
Ilan Stavans reflects on self-translation, and on the lives he has lived in Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and English....
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