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Biography & Letters / Latin America / Literature & Criticism / Judaica

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Ilan Stavans Eight Conversations Neal Sokol "Ilan Stavans has emerged as Latin America's liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast." —Washington Post The New York Times described Ilan Stavans as "the czar of Latino literature in the United States." But his influential oeuvre doesn't address Hispanic culture exclusively. It has also opened fresh new vistas into Jewish life globally, which has prompted the Forward to portray Stavans as "a maverick intellectual whose canonical work has already produced a whole array of marvels that are redefining Jewishness." In Neal Sokol's candid, thought-provoking series of eight interviews Stavans is caught at the vortex where his Mexican, Jewish, and American heritages meet. He discusses everything from the formative influences that shaped his worldview to anti-Semitism, Edmund Wilson, sexuality in Latin America, Gabriel García Márquez, and the fate of Yiddish. He also contrasts the role of intellectuals in advanced and developing societies, dwells on his admiration for Don Quixote, his passion for dictionaries, and reflects on his groundbreaking, controversial research on Spanglish—the hybrid encounter of English and Spanish that infuriates the Royal Academy in Madrid. Neal Sokol is a former senior researcher at Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. For more information contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

May 2004 220 pp.  6 x 9 ISBN 0-299-19910-X Cloth $24.95 t To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.