Washington Post

What do ‘Latino voters’ want? The GOP thinks it knows. (Washington Post)

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Is there such a thing as “the Latino voter”?

My father, a Peruvian, was something of a Republican, even when he wasn’t yet a citizen of the United States. For the first 15 years of my parents’ marriage, in Peru, he was mostly concerned with the careening allegiances of his own countrymen: the gaping divide between the elites and the poor; the wild, destabilizing vacillation between right wing and left wing in Latin America; the perpetual pendulum swing between oppression and revolution.

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A history of anti-Hispanic bigotry in the United States

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Never before have things seemed so hard for Hispanics. The signals are stark and dire: A drowned father, cradling a dead daughter. A lone mother, defending herself against an armed Border Patrol agent, with a terrified toddler at her side. A diatribe hectoring whites to purge the country of a rising brown tide. A Walmart in El Paso, strewn with the dead. Caravans of the hopeful willing to suffer indignities, splinter their families, cower in cages, risk life itself for a distant dream.

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Why Nigeria’s kidnapped schoolgirls are worth more than gold

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One of Nigeria’s newest businessman, a slave trafficker for the modern age said: “I will marry out a female at 12; I will do same for a nine year old girl like it was done on my own mother. . . . I am the one that captured your girls and I will sell them…

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Nadine Gordimer reflects on her Writing Life. With a profile by Marie Arana.

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Nadine Gordimer’s essay appeared in The Washington Post as part of Marie’s Book World series, “The Writing Life.”  Scroll to the bottom to read Marie’s profile of the writer. The essay and profile can be found in the book, “The Writing Life.” August 5, 2001 Sunday  A Nobel Prize-winner, on being a product of a…

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Marie reviews “Jack 1939”

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I once heard a master of suspense say that the craft was actually quite simple: Take a perfectly normal situation, a trope readers know well, then throw in a wild “what if?” What if your mild-mannered, homebody spouse — so familiar to you — is the midnight stalker in the black balaclava? What if the…

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The Queen’s Lover.

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A society dame with the shrill voice of a street vendor hides her lover upstairs, then steals up for nocturnal raptures. A gay king who can’t stomach his queen sends his most trusted courtier to impregnate her. A palace congested with vermin and lice harbors lamb chops and cakes tucked deep into the upholstery. A…

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On Immigrant Culture

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Three marielitos, three manifest destinies for immigrants of cuban boatlift, freedom rings — in distinctly different tones. By Marie Arana-Ward, Washington Post Staff Writer. Every year about now, the memories rush back. The knock at the door. The police. The neighbors shrieking “Escoria! Gusano!” (“Scum! Worm!”) and wielding rocks. The bumpy bus ride through the…

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A Russian at Large

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Vassily Aksyonov. Say it to a Washingtonian and you’re likely to get a blank stare. And yet Aksyonov may well be the most important writer in this century to hold a Washington address. He has been hailed as a Salinger, a Dostoevsky, a Hemingway, a Tolstoy. Aksyonov is one of the giants of 20th-century Russian literature, but after 16 years of Washington tenure, hardly anyone seems to know he is here.

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Orhan Pamuk

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One of the trickier subjects in fiction is that of the hapless suitor, besotted with love, locked in a lifelong obsession with a woman he can neither leave nor have. Yet, for all the perils of that soupy scenario, great literature has come of it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote memorably of just such a man in “The Great Gatsby”; William Styron, in “Sophie’s Choice”; Gabriel García Márquez, in “Love in the Time of Cholera”; and Mario Vargas Llosa, in “The Bad Girl.”

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Jane Smiley

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A little more than midway through Jane Smiley’s extraordinarily powerful new novel, “Private Life,” the childless wife of a prominent astronomer becomes fascinated with a family of coots, ducklike birds that live on the pond near her house on Mare Island, up San Francisco Bay.

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