Only time, the persistence of works in time, their readings after ten, fifty, or a thousand years will say if the edifice was constructed with strong, durable, or perishable materials.

I felt the arrogance with which one regards the dispossessed.

The girl with a ponytail says: “Look at the sky,” and the other says, “The sky sucks.”

I would like to write as if I were in a passing car, with the radio on, which is one of the most delectable sensations I know.

And try to imagine what we will never know for sure: what old grudge (since it did not stem from us) and what precise urgency are at the root of everything that is going to happen today

Cutting through the inane shrubbery means, first off, not writing books that aren’t necessary.

There is an anecdote about translation—which, fittingly, I´ve only come across second-hand—that involves an enthusiastic Ernest Hemingway gushing to a friend that finally, with a new…

It is a well established fact that we know our own countries better from afar.

He kept the body under the counter, right where he stored his medicinal herbs.

Les Cousins Claude Chabrol This dark, eerie—and stunted—coming-of-age story has been following me around for months since I recently saw it for the first time.  In a word, it’s…

I have realized that when a writer emigrates, it takes much longer for him to arrive as a writer than as a person.

That Presence—long feared—was once again in our midst.

In his post, “Our Man in Madrid” series editor Jonathan Blitzer speaks about Wagnerian imprecations and military coups in Juan Carlos Chirinos’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”…

Now the president is gulping down a pair of tranquilizers with his whiskey.

“Madrid es un pueblo,” people here are fond of saying, their tone of paternalism matched only by pride. It’s small, but it’s ours, is more or less the idea.

What began in 1997 as an academic “excursion” became a kind of immigration experience and now seems to have turned into an indisguisable exile

In his excellent new book, Hispanic New York, Columbia University’s Claudio Remeseira stays within the five boroughs and yet has achieved something decidedly, and admirably, far-flung. I think of…