Suspect Sammy

A Letter from Toronto by Andrea Meeson   It’s another Monday morning after another weekend, and another young man is dead at the hands of the Toronto Police Service (TPS). Let’s start with his name, Sammy Yatim, give him the due respect before we tag him, like his peers, in our loaded language of ‘other’:  brown; […]

Memento Mori

A Letter from Harlem by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. When I came home from abroad, death was in style. I don’t remember when I first noticed it; I remember only the moment when a few sightings could no longer be understood as a coincidence. I looked upon familiar scenes and noticed things that had previously escaped me, or perhaps were not there. I […]

Senselessness

Stacy Hardy reviews the English translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya‘s Senselessness (New Directions, 2008, Katherine Silver, trans.).   “I am not complete in the mind.” So begins the first of exiled Honduran novelist Moya’s novels to be translated into English. This riotous satire, set in an unnamed South American country, tells the story of a boozing, sex-obsessed writer who finds himself employed by the Catholic Church. […]

Threatening the Hormonal Stability of Imbeciles

Born in Honduras in 1957 and raised in El Salvador, Horacio Castellanos Moya is part of a new generation of South American novelists who have been catapulted into the public eye (and into translation) following the Roberto Bolaño craze that gripped North America. Stacy Hardy interviewed him.   Like his contemporary Bolaño, Moya’s gritty urbanism and graphic political violence challenges Western perceptions of a Latin American […]