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Latin America

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2020 Edition

                           World Literature: Latin America

                                        History

     Memory of Fire Trilogy (Genesis, Faces and Masks, Century of the Wind), Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Mirrors, The Book of Embraces, Voices in Time, Hunter of Stories, Eduardo Galeano

     Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, John Charles Chasteen

     Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of The Mayan Book of The Dawn of Life and The Glories of Gods and Kings, Dennis Tedlock

     When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, Matthew Restall

     Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries, The Last Days of the Incas, Kim MacQuarrie

      Liberators: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, Andrew Harvey

     Evita: The Real Life of Eva Peron, Nicholas Fraser, Marysa Navarro

     Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, Alma Guillermopriet

     Tango: the Art History of Love, Robert Thompson

                                         Literature

    Collected Fictions, Selected Poems, Selected Non-Fictions, This Craft of Verse, Jorge Borges

Jorge Borges: a literary biography, Emir Monegal

     The Complete Stories, Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector

Reading with Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous

     Terra Nostra, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo, The Campaign, Christopher Unborn, A Change of Skin, The Eagle’s Throne, The Orange Tree, The Crystal Frontier, Destiny and Desire, Myself with Others: Selected Essays, This I Believe, A New Time for Mexico, Carlos Fuentes

     Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar

     Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo

     Yankee Invasion: A Novel of Mexico City, Ignacio Solares

     Texas: The Great Theft, Carmen Boullosa

     One Hundred Years of Solitude, The General in His Labrynth, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love And Other Demons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

     Five Decades: 1925-1970, Pablo Neruda

     The Labrynth, Selected Poems, Octavio Paz

     The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Louis de Bernieries

     Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel

     Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Buenos Aires Affair, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango, Eternal Curse on Reader of These Pages, Blood Of Requited Love, Manuel Puig

     Men of Maize, Mirror of Lida Sal: Tales Based on Mayan Myths and Guatemalan Legends, Miguel Asturias

     A Plan for Escape, The Invention of Morel, The Dream of Heroes, Diary of the War of the Pig, Asleep in the Sun, Adolfo Bioy-Casares

     Leopoldina’s Dream, Thus Were Their Faces,The Promise, Silvina Ocampo

     Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon, Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars, The War of the Saints, Tent of Miracles, The Discovery of America by the Turks, Showdown, Shepherds of the Night, Home is the Sailor, The Violent Land, Jorge Amado

     Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve, Gioconda Belli

     Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Green House, The Way to Paradise, The Bad Girl, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, The Dream of the Celt, Touchstones, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Feast of the Goat, The Time of the Hero, The War of The End of the World, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,  Mario Vargas Llosa

     The Alchemist, The Aleph, Paulo Coelho

     Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel, The Lizard’s Tail, He Who Searches, The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories, Symmetries, Bedside Manners, Luisa Valenzuela

     Sobre héroes y tumbas, Abaddón el Exterminador, El túnel, (Spanish only/untranslated) Ernesto Sabato

     Palinuro de Mexico (Spanish only/untranslated), Fernando del Paso

     The Fair (Spanish only/untranslated), Juan Jose Arreola

     Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez,

     Persephone, 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile, The Lord of the Last Days: Visions of the Year 1000, Eyes to See Otherwise, Time of Angels, Homero Aridjis

     The Dark Bride, Laura Restrepo

     Purgatory, Anteparadise, Raul Zurita

     Poems of Cesar Vallejo, Hays trans

     Mouthful of Birds, Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

     The Savage Detective, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, 2666, Woes of the True Policeman, Antwerp, The Unknown University, The Insufferable Gaucho,  Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003, Last Evenings on Earth, The Return, Roberto Bolano

     The Obscene Madame D, Letters From a Seducer, With my Dog Eyes, Hilda Hist

     The Art of Flight, The Journey, The Magician of Vienna, Sergio Pitol

     Among the Lost, Emiliano Monge

    Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

     Where the Bird Sings Best, The Son of Black Thursday, Albina and the Dog-Men, Alejandro Jodorowsky

 Anarchy and Alchemy: the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky

     Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik

     The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Leonora Carrington

      When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut

     Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica  

Before the Oct update:

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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