RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Letters From Latin America
Fiction and poetry from Argentinean, Mexican, Latinx and Ecuadorean writers
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
IT’S entirely fitting that The Scent of Buenos Aires (Archipelago Books, £18), the first collection of short stories by Argentinian writer Hebe Uhart to be translated into English, has the reproduction of a painting by Xul Solar on its cover.
The Argentinian visual artist was not only a great painter, sculptor and writer but an inventor of imaginary languages and it is possible to deduce that from Uhart’s well-crafted short stories with their strange narratives exploring the oddities and mysteries of daily life with a new and simple language.
Always revealing, these witty and sometimes cryptic tales are mostly set in Buenos Aires by a writer’s writer who has an acute eye for the uncanny and the mundane.
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LEO BOIX introduces a bold novel by Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo, a raw memoir from Cuban-Russian author Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and powerful poetry by Mexican Juana Adcock
A novel by Argentinian Jorge Consiglio, a personal dictionary by Uruguayan Ida Vitale, and poetry by Mexican Homero Aridjis
Travelogue/reportage by Argentinean Maria Sonia Cristoff, and poetry by Peruvian Gaston Fernandez and Puerto Rican Cristina Perez Diaz
An outstanding novel by Chilean writer and activist Pedro Lemebel, a poetry pamphlet by Venezuelan Natasha Tiniacos, and a children’s book of haikus singing the beauty of Cuba