To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Letters From Latin America: July 21, 2022
New titles from across the continent: fiction by Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos and Peruvian Katya Adaui and poetry collections by Chilean Veronica Zondek, Peruvian Julia Wong Kcomt and Mexican Adriana Diaz Enciso
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
INVASION of the Spirit People (And Other Stories, £11.99) is Juan Pablo Villalobos sixth novel and one of his most compelling.
The story set in unnamed city where migrants battle against a worrying rise of neofascism, right-wing nationalism and societal paranoias about foreigners.
The main character, a middle-aged man “from the Southern Cone” called Gaston who is best friends with Max, an immigrant who runs a shabby restaurant in the city, and Pol, Max’s son, a young biologist sent to the tundra to research micro-organisms capable of surviving in extreme conditions.
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ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin