Emerging from the supernatural shadows – Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning novel pulses with the energy of Latin America’s post-Marquez generation

In the Dominican Republic, “a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow”, as Junot Diaz observes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. In some ways, it was self-evident that Diaz would win the big prize this year: no other book on the American scene in 2007 had quite its pizzazz or freshness. Junot’s book was – as they say – long-awaited: eleven years had passed since Drown, his effervescent debut collection of short stories. Of course only rarely do long-awaited novels live up to their promise. This one really did.

But let’s go back to that “supernatural shadow”. In the wake of the Boom movement, one had begun to expect fictions from the Latino world to participate in the magic realism that fuelled the stories of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Alejo Carpentier and others. One got tired of writers who depended on this technique, so easy to imitate and yet difficult to use in any illuminating way. With understandable discomfort, the younger generation of Latin American novelists, such as those represented by the Bogota 39 group, which gathered in Bogota last August, have shrunk from the mannerisms of the Boom. As one of its members, the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez put it: “the Boom castrated the generation that followed it.”"*

*From: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

• Ricardo Salinas Breaks Ground for What Will Be the Most Modern Television Studio in Latin America – Mexico City
• Raul Humberto Yzaguirre, 70, a veteran activist in the civil rights struggle of Hispanics in the United States, has been accepted by the Dominican Government as new American ambassador in the country.
• Brazil replaces Mexico as China’s top market in Latin America and boosts its surplus as well.
• Reviewed: Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, edited by Lavaca, 320 pages, Haymarket Books, 2007.
• Featured Holiday Book: Las Christmas, by Esmeralda Santiago and Joie Davidow
• Interview with Rose Contreras, founder of Onda Books
• Anthology on Juan Bosch spreads Dominican thought abroad
• LatAm Immigrants Are Changing Spain, Sociologist Says
• Interview with Children’s Author Lucia Gonzalez – Gonzalez’s latest children’s book, The Storyteller’s Candle, is dedicated to Pura Belpre
• Interview with Aurora Anaya-Cerda, owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore – NYC
• Mexico City Noir and the Six Word Story
• The current global crisis will cause the number of poor people in Latin America to rise by 9 million to 189 million this year, the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean said in a report presented on Thursday.
• The leader of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Latin American division, Vicente Trius, is leaving the company after having served less than five months in the position.
• Beginning with the 2009-2010 season, Terra will stream select games live throughout Latin America, in both Spanish and Portuguese
• My Latino Book Review: Belinda Acosta’s “Drama, Damas and Ana Ruiz”
• The first two volumes of the “Nueva gramatica de la lengua española” (New Grammar of the Spanish Language) will go on sale in Spain and Latin America on Dec. 4, the Association of Spanish Language Academies and Espasa publishing house announced Wednesday.
• From the Bookshelves: And You Welcomed Me: Migration and Catholic Social Teaching
• Renuncia reina en Miss Colombia – Laura Núñez, quien el lunes en la noche fue elegida como tercera princesa, dejó su cargo unas horas después de la coronación; le critican su falta de seriedad
• Paulina Rubio fue la reina en Miss Colombia
• The Associated Press on Wednesday announced changes in its Latin America and Caribbean operations, closing a service limited to Puerto Rican news within Puerto Rico while adding editors and reporters elsewhere for the expanding Spanish market in the Americas.