Topic: December 2005
NOT TO BE MISSED! MARGIN READING!
Kathleen Alcala, Wayne Ude and editor Tamara Kaye Sellman will present "Five Fabulist Years of Pacific Northwest Magical Realism" at Epilogue Books (Ballard) in Seattle on Wed December 14 at 6pm as part of the ProseWest series.
Here's an excellent change to pick up a copy of the collectible Periphery III: Reasonable Facsimiles (going, going, gone!) as well as to contribute to the library restoration project coordinated between Periphery IV: Southern Revival and the four-star literacy charity, First Book.
Come one, come all! 2821 NW Market St, (206) 297-2665. Open mic follows for both prose and poetry.
NOT ALL LATIN AMERICAN WRITERS ARE MAGICAL REALISTS!
MARGIN's readers all know how much we love the Magical Realism here, but it's always good to underscore that MR isn't just the singular writing style of Latin America.
Writes foreign service correspondent Monica Campbell of the San Francisco Chronicle in her article, "In Mexico, young authors look beyond El Boom,"
"The new fiction writers readily salute the powerful influence of El Boom, but are weary of a literary style that has long typecast Latin American literature.Writer Ignacio Padilla, author of Shadow Without a Name and the odyssey-laden story collection Antipodes, is unequivocal. "[Garcia] Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of the books that convinced me to stop and think about how I could be a writer. Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar did that, too. But we've also been influenced by non-Latin writers like Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro…There's nothing wrong with magic realism, but we're not interested in imitating [it]."
He speaks for a cadre of writers of other types of fiction working from all across Mexico, in such locations as Monterrey, Puebla and Tijuana—not your typical Mexico City-based collective.
Similarly, author Jorge Volpi isn't interested in defining his Mexican identity through writing. His spy thriller, In Search of Klingsor (2002), was set in Nazi Germany and has been translated into 16 languages. He joined Padilla in 1996 to form what is known as Mexico's Crack group to expand their authorial horizons beyond what might be thought of as the "cultural assignment of magical realism" to a world of writing which lies beyond Mexico altogether. Their efforts to shrug off stereotyping are helping to liberate many Latino writers who are expected to write magical realism and only magical realism.
Let's hold out hope that they can all excel beyond their wildest dreams.