MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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Letters From Latin America
Fiction and poetry from Argentinean, Mexican, Latinx and Ecuadorean writers
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
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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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
LEO BOIX reviews Cuban poet Carlos Pintado; Mexican poet Diana Garza Islas; Mexican American writer and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez; and Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos