Posts featuring Luis Negrón

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Slovakia, Belgium, and Puerto Rico!

This week, our editors from around the world report on a controversial book prize winner in Slovakia, a comic strip festival in Belgium, and a moving performance of a collection of short stories centered on gay life in Puerto Rico. Read on to find out more!

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Slovakia

Throughout June, ten writers longlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera, presented their works online, at events in the capital, Bratislava, and the open-air summer festival Pohoda held at Trenčín airfield. However, much attention was paid to a major controversy surrounding one of the nominated books, Nicol Hochholczerová’s remarkable debut Táto izba sa nedá zjesť (This Room Can’t be Eaten Up), which depicts the relationship between a 12-year-old schoolgirl and her teacher, a man in his fifties. While there is universal agreement on the book‘s literary merits—it is among the five works on the award’s shortlist, announced on 7 September—the decision to also nominate it for the René Prize—a competition in which students of selected secondary schools choose a winner from five books—raised concerns that neither the 18-year-old students nor their teachers are equipped to handle  sensitive subject without specialist psychological support. Fearing the withdrawal of funding or even lawsuits by incensed parents, the jury decided to withdraw Hochholczerová’s book from the competition, offering instead to send the book to the schools on request. While the resulting turmoil was great for sales, it has caused a rift in the literary community, put the talented young writer under a huge amount of stress, and aroused some fear that it has sounded the death knell of the René Prize.

After two years of Covid-related disruptions, the Authors’ Reading Month (ARM), Europe’s largest literary festival, organized by the Brno-based publishing house Větrné mlýny in partnership with Slovakia’s Literárny klub, returned this summer. It was hosted by venues in five cities of the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Lviv, which has hosted the festival in the past, was not on this year’s itinerary because of the war in Ukraine). With Icelandic literature as the focus of the twenty-third edition, some of the best-known Czech and Slovak writers were paired with thirty-one authors from Iceland, including Hallgrímur Helgason, Bragi Ólafsson, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson, as well as Sjón, who also attended the Slovak premiere of The Northman, the American epic action thriller based on Viking myths whose script he co-wrote with the director Robert Eggers.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Book fairs, Booker longlists, and magazine launches from Thailand, Puerto Rico, India, and Romania!

This week, our editors from around the globe report on the political undertones of a Bangkok book fair, new translations of Indian literature, new magazines out of Puerto Rico, and celebrations of Francophone literature in Romania. Read on to find out more!

Peera Songkünnatham, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Thailand

Bookworms are back wheeling their suitcases around in the country’s biggest book fair. It is the place to get another year’s worth of kong dong (“pile of pickles”)—i.e., unread books. After a cancellation last year and a move online the year before, the twelve-day National Book Fair, organized by the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand is being held at the new rail transport hub, Bangsue Grand Station, until April 6. Many publishers, both major and independent, release new books in anticipation of this event, where they can get a bigger cut from sales and buyers have come to expect extra-special discounts. With over 200 publishers participating, author meet-and-greets, and predictable logistical complaints at the temporary new venue, we can perhaps sense a return to normalcy.

If one looks at this normalcy more closely, however, one can see an increasing trend of explicit politicization in the largely commercial enterprise. The calendar of main-stage events includes book launches by pro-democracy politicians from the Move Forward Party and the Progressive Movement (of the disbanded Future Forward Party). The names of four such politicians, all men, grace the official calendar—without the titles of their books, oddly enough. The Progressive Movement is also publishing its first translation: an illustrated children’s book, นี่แหละเผด็จการ (Así es la dictadura) by Equipo Plantel, first published in 1977 in post-Franco Spain. These examples provide quite a contrast to ostensibly political but effectively depoliticizing events led by, for lack of a better word, the literary establishment, like the panel discussion “Stepping into the Third Decade of the Phan Waen Fa Award: Political Literature for Democratic Development,” featuring three award committee members and a literary scholar.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Bringing you the latest in world literature news.

Never is there a dull period in the world of literature in translation, which is why we make it our personal mission to bring you the most exciting news and developments. This week our Editors-at-Large from Mexico, Central America, and Spain, plus a guest contributor from Lithuania, are keeping their fingers on the pulse! 

Paul M. Worley and Kelsey Woodburn, Editors-at-Large, reporting from Mexico: 

On February 21, numerous events throughout Mexico took place in celebration of the International Day of Mother Languages. In San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, CELALI (the State Center for Indigenous Language and Art) held a poetry reading featuring Tseltal poet Antonio Guzmán Gómez, among others, and officially recognized Jacinto Arias, María Rosalía Jiménez Pérez, and Martín Gómez Rámirez for their work in developing and fortifying indigenous languages in the state.

Later in San Cristóbal, at the Museum of Popular Cultures, there was a poetry reading that brought together four of the Indigenous Mexican poetry’s most important voices: Mikeas Sánchez, Adriana López, Enriqueta Lúnez, and Juana Karen, representing Zoque, Tseltal, Tsotsil and Ch’ol languages, respectively. Sánchez, Lúnez, and Karen have all published in Pluralia Ediciones’s prestigious “Voces nuevas de raíz antigua” series.

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Interview with Luis Negrón

"I wanted a book that showed how people find happiness, even if society at large thinks that in their life there is no space for it."

Reading Luis Negrón’s award-winning debut short story collection, Mundo Cruel, one is struck by the author’s daring, his at-times startling insights, and his blistering sense of humor. It is a remarkable collection, and the first translated work to win a Lambda Literary Award for gay general fiction. In his interview with Asymptote blog, Negrón talks about melodrama and monsters in fiction, homophobia in present-day Puerto Rico, and his experience with acclaimed translator Suzanne Jill Levine.

Eva Richter: Your epigraph is a quote from Manuel Puig’s “A Melodramatic Destiny.” “So then, a melodrama is a drama made by someone who doesn’t know the difference, Miss?” / “Not exactly, but in a certain way it is a second-rate product.” How does the notion of melodrama as a second-rate or even naive drama play into your short stories? 

Luis Negrón: There are two ways to answer this question. One, the most obvious one, is by explaining melodrama itself: it is a drama where destiny cannot be escaped. I played with and tried to transform this notion of melodrama in my texts, but not only with the structure of them, but with their aura, the environment of the melodrama, its false and perhaps fake way of suffering. It is also important to put the stories in context. In Latin America, melodrama is king. Our music is melodramatic; our politics are melodramatic, our sports, our way or conceiving love, romantic love, all kinds of love, are pure melodrama. It is our way of dealing with most situations. This is more the case in the working class population, where access to different forms of dealing with feelings are not at hand or are simply unknown. For this reason, melodrama is abundant in the book: it shows how my characters construct whole gammas of feelings, and how they make decisions or just follow the paths dictated by their destiny.

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