Browsing 41 posts in Contributors
Leave a Comment
Mexico City | Cities | Contributors | Home Page
Congratulations, Margo Glantz!!
by David Gutherz · 08/31/10
Margo Glantz, whose piece “Shoes: Andante With Variations” appears in our most recent issue, has just been awarded the 2010 Literature Prize in Romance Languages at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In a statement released with the award, the jury lauded Margo’s “extensive literary career,” her ability to combine fluidly the “language of different disciplines” and commented that, “Margo Glantz has demonstrated that Latin American identity is a finished and unfinished journey of multiple social realities that generate a moving continent giving language its force and its multiple connections to the world.”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!
Mexico City | Cities | Contributors | Multimedia
Hey, Chicago: “Backyard” in your backyard!
by David Gutherz · 08/18/10
Citizens of the Windy City, be sure not to miss a rare opportunity to see the thought provoking thriller Backyard (El Traspatio). Mexico’s official submission to the 2010 Academy Awards, Backyard is a fictionalized account of the all-too-real 1990′s Juarez femicides written by Sabina Berman. A critically aclaimed playwright and contributor to our soon-to-be-released Mexico City issue, Berman has made it clear that she has intentions that transcend the simple catharsis that characterizes the murder-mystery genre. “When people leave the theater,” she told one interviewer, “their sense of right or wrong will be strengthened.”
Presented as part of the Maya Indie Series, Backyard will be playing for only one more night in Chicago. After that, its off to Miami until the 26th.
Contributors | Events
Don’t Forget: Habitus at N.Y.C. Museum of Jewish Heritage Tonight!!
by David Gutherz · 07/14/10
Wondering what to do with your Wednesday? Looking for a change of pace? A little intellectual stimulation, for a change? Well, then, you simply should not miss joining Habitus editor Joshua Ellison for a conversation with celebrated author André Aciman tonight–Wednesday, July 14th–at the Museum of Jewish Heritage as they discuss the provocative question: Is New York the Diaspora?
With its enormous Jewish population, its creativity and culture, and its unparalleled array of options for Jewish living, should we really think of New York City as part of the Jewish Diaspora; or is it just another kind of homeland?
André Aciman has chronicled a life’s journey across continents and has also emerged as one of contemporary New York’s most astute literary observers. He writes: “New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere…a shadow city.” We will talk to André about being a stranger at home in New York, about the place of the city in his recent work, and what it means to be a Jew here.
Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt and, more recently, Call Me By Your Name and Eight White Nights. He is a Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of New York.
Moscow | Cities | Contributors
Grossman vs. Stalin Round II
by David Gutherz · 07/09/10
It has been more than half a century now since the death of Josef Stalin, but Vasily Grossman–the great Russian-Jewish novelist whose work we published in issue five–is still suffering on his account. As The Guardian‘s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding details, Grossman’s work–although increasingly popular in the West–still rubs many Muscovites the wrong way. In the midst of the Kremlin’s quiet but persistent campaign to rehabilitate Stalin, Grossman’s work is seen by many as a pesky reminder of just how bleak, savage, and sad life could be under his Iron Fist. And no doubt Grossman would never want us to forget it. But, then again, to judge his novels as bits of war journalism is like reducing Anna Kareninina to a piece of anarchist pamphleteering. For, as his daughter Ekaterina points out, although never one to blunt the reality of suffering, Grossman also had an uncanny skill for finding warmth amidst the agony and goodness in even the darkest of men. His is a message that deserves to be heard, and one can only hope that in the coming years more readers in his home country learn to unplug their ears.
Mexico City | Contributors | Photography
Habitus photographer on Gaza in NYT
by David Gutherz · 06/23/10
Congratulations to Habitus contributor Katie Orlinsky for getting a number of her stunning photos featured in the New York Times! The upcoming issue of Habitus will be carrying a photo essay of hers on migrant workers in Mexico.
Moscow | Contributors | News | Tidbits
Habitus translator wins PEN grant
by Habitus · 06/21/10
Congratulations to our friend and collaborator Peter Golub, who has won a PEN translation grant for his work with Russian author Linor Goralik. Peter began this project as a commission for our Moscow issue. PEN says:
Peter Golub for a collection of flash fiction by Linor Goralik, an underground Russian author beginning to make a name for herself in the literary mainstream. These very short stories catch their characters in midflight, like strangers on an airplane, combining the mythic with the banal to startling effect, as when the wolf, disobeying doctor’s orders, steps out for one last visit to the three little pigs. (No publisher)
Publishers, take note!
New Orleans | Contributors | News | Tidbits
Rodger Kamenetz on the Gulf oil spill
by Ekaterina Krasavina · 06/14/10
Rodger Kamenetz, the Louisiana-based author who described post-Katrina New Orleans in Habitus 04, continues to trace the city’s misfortunes. Five years ago when New Orleans was struck by the hurricane, it was the human factor that accounted for the graveness of the consequences. This time the disaster is man-made from the start, and the management of its consequences is no more effective than before. In his article for Tablet, Kamenetz compares the bureaucratic and political upheaval that followed the BP oil spill with the absurdist world of Franz Kafka.
He lived every day of his life with a persistent sense of doom—which in New Orleans in hurricane season is called watching the news. So, I think he would have had no trouble feeling his way into this hovering malevolent undersea black cloud of oil and dispersant waiting to strike. Meanwhile BP offers, for our entertainment and distraction, a dog-and-pony sideshow straight out of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.”
Kamenetz offers neither solution, nor salvation. Instead, he turns to a traditionally Jewish response in times of trouble:
It hurts so much it’s funny. In the land of disaster, even a bitter laugh is a start.
Buenos Aires | Contributors | Multimedia
VIDEO: Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky: Once 9:53 – a fotonovela
by Habitus · 04/28/10
Last year, Habitus editor Joshua Ellison introduced Mexican American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans to Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky. Soon afterward, the two began a collaboration, re-imagining the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book that was once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary.
Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building. As the story unfolds, photojournalist Roli Gerchunoff stumbles across the bomb plot—and realizes that he may have a chance to change its outcome.
Stavans and Brodsky have shared an early draft of the book with Habitus, and in the video below speak about their work on on the project, their reasons for reexamining the AMIA bombing, and their enduring affection for the fotonovela.
Buenos Aires | Contributors | Elsewhere
Osvaldo Golijov in Toronto
by Habitus · 02/25/10
Our friend Osvaldo Golijov will bring his music to Toronto next week at the TSO’s sixth-annual New Creations Festival. Golijov was also the subject of a nice profile in The Star.
Each of Golijov’s compositions is different. The influences include South America, the synagogue and the shtetl, wrapped in a life-filled tonal shimmer.
