Read with the Lit & Luz Book Club!
The Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de lectura was created and organized by Miguel Jiménez as an opportunity for Chicagoans to read and discuss some of today’s most exciting contemporary Mexican authors in both Spanish and English. This year’s Lit & Luz Book Club authors include an artistic director and 2021-22 participants.
Club de lectura Lit & Luz fue creada por Miguel Jiménez, para ofrecer una oportunidad en la que todos los residentes de Chicago podrán leer algunos de los más emocionantes textos literarios contemporáneos de hoy día.
July Book
Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018 by Daniel Borzutzky (Coffee House Press)
August Book
Cuaderno de faros / On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines Press)
September Book
Hormigas Rojas / Red Ants by Pergentino José, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead (Deep Vellum)
October BookS
Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong (Phoneme Media)
Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin (Haymarket Books)
Find these titles at official Lit & Luz Book Club Bookstore Partner
Pilsen Community Books
Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018 by Daniel Borzutzky (Coffee House Press)
Club Meeting
Thursday, July 22, 6:30 p.m. CT
online Author conversation with special guest
Tuesday, July 27th, 7 p.m.
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
National Book Award Winner Daniel Borzutzky pens an incandescent indictment of capitalism’s moral decay.
In Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018, Daniel Borzutzky rages against the military industrial complex that profits from violence, against the unjust policing of certain bodies, against xenophobia passing for immigration policy, against hate spreading like a virus. He grieves for children in cages and those slain in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. But pulsing amid Borzutzky’s outrage over our era’s tragedies is a longing for something better: for generosity to triumph over stinginess and for peace to transform injustice. Borzutzky’s strident language juxtaposes the horror of consumer-culture violence with its absurdity, and he masterfully shifts between shock and heartbreak over the course of the collection. Bleak but not hopeless, Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018 is an unflinching poetic reckoning with the twenty-first century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Written after a Massacre in the Year 2018, along with several other poetry collections, including The Book of Interfering Bodies; In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy; The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award; and Lake Michigan, a finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the National Translation Award. He has also translated books by Chilean poets Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a Lit & Luz Artistic Director.
Praise for the book
These poems apply a clarity of conscience and language to the surreal nightmare born of white supremacy and zero-sum-game capitalism. Borzutzky—like Reznikoff and Rukeyser, and Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, whom he has translated—reminds us that poetry is and has long been a tool of reckoning and refusal, a way of singing for what has been stolen, slaughtered, stifled. These are the songs we must learn to sing. —Tracy K. Smith
Borzutzky handles history as liquid, the past a wave forever crashing into the present. . . . an urgently contemporary project, rejecting the pretense of retrospective distance in order to mourn from within chaos.—Hannah Aizenman, The New Yorker
A panoramic and formally various investigation of the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. . . . Borzutzky’s arresting writing sings and stuns as it addresses difficult, painful truths.—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Cuaderno de faros / On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines Press)
Club Meetings
Thursday, August 26, 6:30 p.m. CT
online Author conversation
Tuesday, August 31st, 7 p.m. CT
En inglés con traducción al español de audio en vivo. / In English with live audio translation in Spanish.
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the book
Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses—those structures whose message is “first and foremost, that human beings are here.”
Starting with Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, an engineer charged with illuminating the Scottish coastline, On Lighthouses artfully examines lighthouses from the Spanish to the Oregon coasts and those in the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others.
In trying to “collect” lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone—from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one—concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.
About the Author & the Translator
Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters. Her book of essays Cuerpo extraño (Foreign Body) was awarded the Latin American Voices prize from Literal Publishing in 2013. She has published her work in various print and digital media, such as Nexos, Este País, Dossier, Vice, El Malpensante, Letras Libres and Tierra Adentro. She has a Master's Degree in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, which she completed with the support of a Fulbright grant. She was a grantee of the Young Creators program at FONCA. She is editor and co-founder of Ediciones Antílope. She lives in Mexico City.
Christina MacSweeney received the 2016 Valle Inclan prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París was a finalist in the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. Among the other authors she has translated are: Elvira Navarro (A Working Woman), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Empty Set,Palabras migrantes/Migrant Words), and Julián Herbert (Tomb Song, The House of the Pain of Others).
Praise for the book
Precise and erudite, Barrera’s writing is as alluring and arresting as the landscapes and stories it conveys. Each piece is crafted with care, imbued with Barrera’s poignant critical sense and her perspicacious ability to unravel the different levels of affect, historicity, and magnificence that constitute the everyday life of each lighthouse. —Los Angeles Review of Books
Lighthouses, the ‘frontier between civilization and nature,’ are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we’ll see and things we’ll do when we can go out again.—The Paris Review
[On Lighthouses] examines literature, history, science, art, music, and the daily, brutal lives of the isolated keepers and their families. . . . These subtle, reflective observations offer delightful insights into the lighthouse mystique.—Kirkus Reviews
Hormigas rojas / Red Ants by Pergentino José, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead (Deep Vellum)
Club Meeting
Thursday, September 23, 6:30 p.m. CT
online Author conversation
Tuesday, September 28th, 7:30 p.m. CT
En español con traducción al inglés de audio en vivo. / In Spanish with live audio translation in English.
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
A literary triumph by a member of the Mexico20 (the list that boasts Valeria Luiselli and Carlos Velasquez, among others), Red Ants is the first-ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec. This vibrant collection of short stories by one of Mexico’s most promising young authors paints a candid picture of indigenous Mexican life—an essential counterpoint to cultural products of the colonial gaze. José’s fantastical stories tackle themes of family, love, and independence in his signature style: unapologetically personal, coolly emotional, and always surprising.
About the Author and the translator
Pergentino José was born in 1981 in a Zapotec village in the Pacific highlands of Oaxaca. He has published poetry and prose in both Zapotec and Spanish and is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, the Mexican government's prestigious fellowship program for artists and writers. Red Ants is his first book in English, and the first literary translation into English from the Sierra Zapotec.
Thomas Bunstead writes for The Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review Daily, and The Independent on Sunday. His short stories have been published in >kill author, Days of Roses, and Text’s Bones. Bunstead is guest editor for the forthcoming Words Without Borders feature on Mexico. He has translated Aixa de la Cruz, Eduardo Halfon, Yuri Herrera, and Rodrigo Fresán.
Praise for the book
A set of short stories in which the peculiarity and the fantasy of Zapotec popular legends are brought to life by the imaginative and powerful pen of a great author in the making—what is perhaps a true breath of fresh and original air that does our national literature much good. —Mónica Maristain
Red Ants, Zapotec writer Pergentino José blends magical realism with the mythology of his upbringing to shine a light on the historical struggles of Mexico’s indigenous communities — and to make clear that the threats they face have not gone away….he succeeds in taking readers to a different world, one that they did not expect but will be unlikely to forget. —Mariana Reina, Americas Quarterly
Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong (Phoneme Media)
Virtual Club meeting
Thursday, October 7, 6:30 p.m. CT
ONLINE AUTHOR CONVERSATION WITH SPECIAL GUEST
Tuesday, October 12, 7:30 p.m. CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
AbouT THE BOOK
Diorama is both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocío Cerón, who guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes. As unrelentingly tactile as it is unapologetically cerebral, Rocío Cerón’s new book asks that we relinquish control and submit to the poet’s brutal lyricism, and to a new kind of order imposed like a penumbra between us and the waking world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rocío Ceron writes the kind of poetry that unfolds slowly, over several readings. It’s dense and demanding. It’s layered and difficult. And for that I love it. In the wonderful translator’s note, Anna Rosenwong writes, “So much of reading and translating poetry is training your ear to the text’s private language.” Here, Ceron’s text invents its own language as it goes, and so we must learn to trust it, to allow meaning and image and sound to rise up rather than to demand that the text, or the work, reveal itself immediately.—Entropy
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
Cerón’s creation can best be described thus: she summons words. Like iron filings to a magnet, they come into an order that feels inevitable.—Johnny Payne, Cleaver Magazine
Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin (Haymarket Books)
Club Meeting
Thursday, October 21, 6:30 p.m. CT
online Author conversation
Tuesday, October 26, 7:30 p.m. CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
Krista Franklin draws on Pan African histories, Black Surrealism, Afrofuturism, pop culture, art history, and the historical and present-day micro-to-macro violence inflicted upon Black people and other people of color, working to forge imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions of liberation.
Featuring 30 poems, 30 artworks, an author statement and an interview, Too Much Midnight chronicles the intersections between art and life, art and writing, the historical and the speculative, cultural and personal identity, the magical and the mundane.
About the Author
Krista Franklin’s work emerges at the intersection of poetics, popular culture, and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora. Krista lives in Chicago, IL.
Praise for the book
Krista Franklin is for grown folks only. Too Much Midnight is a brilliant synthesis of her stunning and wildly influential visual art with a series of poems that wrench at the gut of you. This is truth-telling in the vein of Nelson Algren and Patricia Smith, poetry from heavy and dark places-- dark like blood, dark like midnight, dark like obsidian stone, like ‘blue-black everything. —Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919
There doesn’t seem to be a word big enough for all that Krista Franklin is, what miracles she can make when tested with a blank page in front of her. The specificity of her sculpting, her ability to be witness, maker, collector, and knife to all our stories. Too Much Midnight is an exercise in precision, both the blade and the wound it is thrust in. Franklin imagines and re-invents, holding a magnifying glass to things most leave unsaid. Her language collages into and onto itself, leaving the reader in the middle of a whirlwind of words and images, demanding that they contend with it all. After this book, all other language feels weak.—Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us
Too Much Midnight is what happens when you cross Betye Saar and James Baldwin, Octavia Butler and Chuck D. Krista Franklin archives the battles and beauties of black life. Her kinships are familial ("Clifton, Brooks, Knight, Grandma & Grandpa Franklin...”), political (“Taking the Country Back: The Tea Party Pantoum”), and cultural (“Oshun As Ohio Players”). These superb poems and images synthesize intimacy and activism, passion and wonder. Franklin’s artwork resonates like visual poetry, her poetry resonates like lyrical music. Too Much Midnight is phenomenal. —Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin
For questions about groups, content, or other, contact
Miguel Jiménez, miguel@makemag.org
If you’re looking for additional recommendations, please check out these past book club titles:
