Charlie Vázquez

#LatinoLit: The Cruel World of Luis Negrón

Mundo Cruel (Seven Stories Press, 2013) by Luis Negrón: Available February 26, 2013 A recent spike in publishing projects by avant-garde Puerto Rican writers and presses has caught the attention of some stateside industry professionals and Luis Negrón’s “Mundo Cruel” may just be the icebreaker that will hopefully reveal a largely unknown community of excellent writers […]

  • Feb 20, 2013
  • 7:35 AM

Seis del Sur: Resurrecting the Bronx’s Fiery Past

Seis del Sur is a photography exhibit running through March 8th, 2013 at the Bronx Documentary Center. The Bronx of the 1970s through the early 1990s comes back to life in this rare and emotional exhibit that showcases the work of six talented Puerto Rican photographers who were working side-by-side (often not even knowing so) […]

  • Jan 22, 2013
  • 9:14 AM

#LatinoLit: Cristy C. Road’s “Spit and Passion” Revisits Latina Punk Identity and More

Beware: the front cover boasts a blurb line courtesy of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong—”Cristy C. Road is a badass.” This six-chapter graphic novela takes a curious look back at the often painful crossroads of the US-born Latino bicultural experience and the awkward gelling of artistic and sexual identity. Cristy C. Road’s Miami childhood, commandeered by powerful matriarchs and the […]

  • Dec 30, 2012
  • 5:00 PM

#Latinolit Banned Book Review: “The Devil’s Highway” by Luis Alberto Urrea

Based on a true story that unfolded in the deserts and mountains of the Devil’s Highway region—a landscape so harsh and brutal that it even claims the lives of people born in adjacent deserts, and one that became the preferred “crossing” route for Coyotes (guides that lead crossers from Mexico to the US) once the […]

  • Dec 12, 2012
  • 7:56 AM

#LatinoLit: Hitchcock Meets Latino Noir in Manuel Muñoz’s “What You See in the Dark”

Reviewed by Matt Mendez Manuel Muñoz’s debut novel, What You See in the Dark, may be difficult to classify at first glance (both editions are adorned with wonderfully pulp cover art). Is the novel a mystery? Historical fiction? Literary fiction? Latino fiction? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Written in both exacting and graceful […]

  • Dec 6, 2012
  • 9:00 AM

#LatinoLit: Emanuel Xavier’s “Americano”

A majority of Latinos in the U.S., according to a few surveys we were able to find, support gay marriage nowadays. And although we’ve come a long way in this basic civil rights battle, it’s easy to forget that things weren’t always so sunny for those who found themselves at the crossroads of the gay […]

  • Nov 27, 2012
  • 5:27 PM

#LatinoLit: Xanath Caraza’s “Conjuro” Is Word Magic

Xánath Caraza’s “Conjuro” is a textural salsa of clashing and dazzling cultures, languages, histories and ancestral memories assembled in poems organized as bilingual pairings, mainly in English/Spanish, yet also with embellishments of Nahuatl and other non-European tongues that lend her painting-like compositions a dimension all their own, invoking themes of diaspora, sensuality, the subconscious, nativism, […]

  • Nov 16, 2012
  • 4:58 PM

#LatinoLit: Jaime Manrique On His New Book “Cervantes Street” (Akashic, 2012)

The Colombian-born, award-winning author chats with Latino Rebels about his riveting new historical novel based on the mysterious life of the author of Don Quixote, the Golden Age of Spain's most famous literary text, and what many consider to be the first modern novel. Interview by Charlie Vázquez LR: Much of Miguel de Cervantes’ life is […]

  • Oct 22, 2012
  • 5:59 PM

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