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.
Read MoreA history of anti-Hispanic bigotry in the United States
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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“Now I’m a mother and a married woman,” begins Bianca, the narrator of this account, “but not long ago I led a life of crime. My brother and I had been orphaned. Somehow that justified everything. We didn’t have anyone. And it all happened overnight.”
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Book review by Marie Arana, full review at The Washington Post. Told and retold since time immemorial — by fabulists from Shakespeare to Bertolt Brecht — the story of Joan of Arc shows no sign of loosening its grip on our imaginations. “She was honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was,” Mark Twain rhapsodized,…
Read MoreMarie reviews “Jack 1939”
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…
Read MoreThe Queen’s Lover.
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…
Read MoreThe Hay-Adams Author Series in Washington DC
The Hay-Adams Author Series, Wednesday, May 23, 2012. Marie co-hosted a special luncheon appearance and conversation with Joyce Carol Oates at 12 noon at the Hay-Adams, on the corner of 16th St and H, Washington DC. For future tickets for Hay-Adams events, contact: [email protected]
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“Compelling. It’s an age-old story, but in Arana’s skillful, perceptive telling, her characters propel themselves toward a climax both unpredictable and inevitable.” —The Washington Post
Read MoreA Russian at Large
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.
Read MoreOrhan Pamuk
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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