Juan Vidal

In 1948, Clarice Lispector wrote a moving letter to her sister Tania, offering some pointed advice: "Have the courage to transform yourself," she wrote, "to do what you desire." It's a fairly simple exhortation, and yet I wonder how many people can't manage it, how many squander their entire lives, ...

In her debut novel Ex Utero, Laurie Foos tells the story of a woman who misplaces her uterus at a shopping mall, "somewhere between the shoe store and the lingerie counter." After her womb goes missing her husband feels utterly lost, and others are quick to deem her careless. While ...

Every so often, an artist comes along who simply resonates. They show up and fill a particular void in our cultural consciousness, whether in prose, song or film. They tap into something that feels especially new, and at times transcendent.

Leon Bridges is one of those artists. The 25-year-old crooner ...

Lately, my prayers have become a form of artistic expression: Carefully chosen words, praise reports like songs, and sometimes pissed-off pronouncements entwined with polite requests that I please not screw something up. This season of life has required thoughtful consideration of even my private devotional time — and that makes ...

Money has long been notorious for its way of complicating things. We can never have too much — but most often there's just not enough. In the wrong hands, it breaks bonds and brings down kingdoms. And while it may be the commodity which ties us together as citizens of ...

Poetry is the secret story, the story behind the story — or, as Wordsworth puts it, what is "felt in the blood and felt along the heart." Poetry is language broken down, chiseled, and refined, made to say what is unsayable through any other means. And while it is ...

For decades, the name Renata Adler has provoked a host of differing opinions. She's been loved, hated, feared, admired and ostracized by literary institutions for her brazen and uncompromising views on journalism and the role of the journalist. Adler has never been one to succumb to the pressures of the ...

"On this side I have old age, and on this side I have death." — Alejandro Jodorowsky

First, a hard-boiled fact: No one alive today, anywhere, has been able to demonstrate the sheer possibilities of artistic invention — and in so many disciplines — as powerfully as Alejandro Jodorowsky. An ...

During the Stalin years, there were tight restrictions on science fiction in the Soviet Union. Writers were pressured and boxed in, urged to stick to themes of adventure, space travel and the glowing prospect of Soviet scientific and technological achievements.

But after Stalin's death and the relaxation of censorship policies, ...

In The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño invents the "visceral realists," a group of poetry-mad troublemakers who read and write incessantly. They also shoplift, sleep around, and drift from place to place — causing mayhem at workshops and picking fights with lesser poets for sport. All of them are guided by ...

Editor's note: This post is about the evolution of a word that is highly offensive to some and includes other offensive language.

If, unlike me, you've never had cause to become familiar with the term "spic," you can see it in action in the story of a veteran Boston ...

For many of us, winter is a time for turning inward, for quelling fears, for resolving to stay warm and alive, or just for remembering that there is so much ahead to wonder over. And though at times it can just feel bleak and bloody awful, the season can be ...

Miami Chef Douglas Rodriguez is known as the "Godfather of Nuevo Latino Cuisine" for the pan-Latin American style of cooking he helped pioneer. But, as the son of Cuban immigrants, his early cooking education was firmly rooted in the traditions of his parents' homeland.

Now that the U.S. has taken ...

This month, Canadian literary journal Descant — which published new work from authors like Margaret Atwood and Isabel Allende — announced it will be closing up shop after 44 years.

"After long and painful negotiations and deliberations for four years," wrote editor-in-chief Karen Mulhallen, "we have jointly decided that ...

Gas stations have long been synonymous with cold pizza, dried-out doughnuts and mediocre hot dogs rotating on unappetizing roller grills. But in cities like Miami, Kansas City, and even Saxapahaw, N.C., among others, patrons can fuel up on gourmet grub and top off their tanks in one stop.

Gas station ...

NBC is airing a live version of Peter Pan on Thursday, nearly 60 years after the first live telecast. Critic David Bianculli says the cast and the revival of the medium are genius.

History and literature are fraught with men of insatiable appetites, who use their gifts of seduction to charm their way into many a bedroom: Casanova, Lord Byron, Don Juan, the list goes on. In Tristana, Benito Pérez Galdós' masterful 1892 novel — newly reissued by NYRB Classics in a translation ...

For Latinos who grew up under the reign of "La Chancla" (the flip flop), the idea of corporal punishment is not a foreign one. Many of us, from the moment we could speak in full sentences, already knew the sting of discipline and all it entailed. We knew that when ...

Research shows that simple changes in drinking habits can help people who've had kidney stones lower the odds that they'll strike again. Consuming plenty of fiber may make a difference, too.

When Roberto Bolano died in 2003, he left behind a body of work that would later distinguish him as the most commanding writer to have emerged from Latin America in the last few decades. Although he gained international acclaim for epics like The Savage Detectives and 2666, his novellas and ...