Posts featuring Llucia Ramis

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from All that Died Among the Bicycles that Day by Llucia Ramis

We’ve been looking at black and white photos of places that no longer exist and of children who are no longer children.

This isn’t autobiography.

All the World’s Men

Every Thursday, my father has lunch with la abuela at her house in Palma.

We bought a roast chicken and la abuela explained that they’d been feeding them fishmeal for a while now. That’s why they tasted that way, and why the eggs tasted fishy, too. And years before that they would deliver live chickens straight from the farm, from Felanitx.

Once, one of her children told la abuela about another animal in the basket, but she didn’t pay it any mind. She left the large crate in the walkway for two days until the stench became unbearable. Only then did she go look, and sure enough, there alongside the chicken was a dead rabbit swarmed by flies. They delivered them dead like that because if not, they’d piss all over. The household maintained a certain aversion to rabbits from that day on.

“Not only that, but you also had to boil it to make sure it was still good. Back then you boiled everything just in case,” my father said.

“In those days, entonses, they said it wasn’t good to eat the chicken skin, it’d give you some kind of sickness, a terrible stomachache or something like that,” la abuela explained.

And my father says: “They’d say you’d turn into a maricón.” READ MORE…