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 includes three 2022-23 Collaboration Cohort participants who will join us in Chicago this fall.
El Club de lectura Lit & Luz fue creado por Miguel Jiménez para ofrecerles la oportunidad a todos los residentes de Chicago de leer algunos de los más emocionantes textos literarios contemporáneos de hoy día.
August Book
Copia / Copy by Dolores Dorantes, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Wave Books, 2022)
September Book
Aves Migratorias / Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches (Transit Books, 2022)
October Book
serie de circunstancias posibles en torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora by yolanda segura, (Almadía, 2021)
Find these titles at official Lit & Luz Book Club Bookstore Partners and get 10% off your purchase!
Pilsen Community Books, Exile in Bookville, and City Lit Books
Copia / Copy by Dolores Dorantes, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Wave Books, 2022)
Club Meeting
August Meet-up:
Thursday, September 1, 6:30 p.m.
Lo Rez Brewery and Taproom, 2101 S Carpenter St, Chicago, IL 60608
online Author conversation for book club podcast
TBD
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
“Without the copying process,” the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, “there would be no life, no reality.” Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & the Translator
Dolores Dorantes is an Acharya in the Buddhist tradition, a journalist, writer, therapist, poet, performer, and sacred animal. She is a Mexican born in the mountains of Veracruz in 1973 but raised in Ciudad Juárez, right next door to El Paso, which is just across the US border. In 2011, she fled her country and was granted political asylum in Los Angeles. Dorantes is Black and Nahua indigenous on her mother's side, Spaniard and mestiza on her father's side. Recent books translated into English are The River, a collaboration with the artist Zoe Leonard, and Style. Her socio-cultural writings and political-social reflections, along with the majority of her books, are part of the commons at www.doloresdorantes.blogspot.com. She believes in a United Latin America.
Robin Myers is a translator and poet. Recent and forthcoming translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry and lives in Mexico City.
Praise for the book
“What makes this work at times inaccessible is also what makes it profound. The writing is elusive and inconclusive, provocative, even brutal. More than anything, it’s enigmatic: Is the above a liberatory invitation? A demanding ultimatum? A delusional mandate? Ultimately, the text asks us to buzz in this ambiguity, in its relentless interrogation of identity and self.” – Diego Baez, Poetry
Aves Migratorias / Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches (Transit Books, 2022)
Club Meetings
September Meet-up:
Thursday, September 29th, 6:30 p.m.
Lo Rez Brewery and Taproom, 2101 S Carpenter St, Chicago, IL 60608
online Author conversation for Book Club Podcast
TBD
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
In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body. With an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver leads us through the underground city of Cappadocia, explores the vicissitudes of a Berlin marked by historical fracture, recalls a shocking childhood exodus, and recreates the intimacy of the spaces we inhabit. Blending criticism, reportage, and a travel writing all her own, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.
Migratory Birds is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.
About the Author & the Translator
Mariana Oliver was born in Mexico City in 1986. She received an MA in Comparative Literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2015. She was a full-time fellow at the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas for literary essay from 2013 to 2015. In 2016, she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Ensayo Joven José Vasconcelos for Aves migratorias (FETA, 2016) which subsequently was published in Colombia (Tragaluz Editores 2019), the US (Transit Books 2021), and Italy (Il Margine 2022). She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on translingual aesthtetics at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.
Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others. Her shorter translations have appeared in various magazines and periodicals, including Words Without Borders, Granta, Tin House, and Guernica. A founding member of Cedilla & Co., Julia sits on the Council of the Authors Guild.
Praise for the book
“Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home. Oliver probes words for their historical and emotional associations, comparing her task to that of women in the rubble of postwar Germany, sorting bricks to salvage what could be used. She sees liberation in language but does not dwell on her own reasons for wandering. Glimpses of her life emerge from beneath the surface, and, like the unexploded bomb in the Rhine that appears in one essay, are potent and mysterious.”—The New Yorker
“Oliver debuts with a thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home. In intimate pieces studded with references to history and literature, Oliver ponders such topics as the tug of home and the consequences of dislocation... Fans of lyrical essays will enjoy this literary global odyssey.”—Publishers Weekly
“Essays haunted by echoes and shadows... In the third entry of the publisher’s Undelivered Lectures series, Mexican-born essayist Oliver debuts with a collection of 10 graceful pieces that include meditations on place, language, exile, and memory.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Mariana Oliver touches down in various times and places, showing how people described their difficulties there and then, and revealing what changes in language arose from these events. From Normandy to Neverland, the through line of this excellent collection is movement, and the essays meander around history in an appealing way... Part memoir, part history, and part travelogue, Migratory Birds explores the vicissitudes of language.”—Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
“Migratory Birds is sensitive and illuminating... a decidedly feminist work, highlighting the vulnerabilities of women—overworked, underappreciated—but also their empowering journeys and choices. Without denying the violence of history, Migratory Birds firmly establishes the emancipating power of dreams and the imagination.”—Farah Abdessamad, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Oliver artfully blends history, travel writing, and glimmers of her own fascinating life in language that is wise and warm, precise and poetic.”—Book Riot
serie de circunstancias posibles en torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora by yolanda segura, (Almadía, 2021)
Club Meeting
October Meet-up
Thursday, October 27th, 6:30 p.m.
Lo Rez Brewery and Taproom, 2101 S Carpenter St, Chicago, IL 60608
Online Author conversation for Book Club Podcast
TBD
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
En ese espacio que la poesía abre entre el flujo de las palabras de todos los días, serie de circunstancias posibles en torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora analiza uno de los conceptos medulares de la economía capitalista. ¿Qué es la “clase media”? ¿Quiénes forman parte de ella? ¿Hay una forma de describirla, de contabilizarla? ¿Se define a sus integrantes a partir del cálculo de sus ingresos, de lo que poseen o sueñan? ¿De sus proyectos de futuro?
Mientras reflexiona sobre estas preguntas, yolanda segura cuenta la historia de Eloísa, una mujer nacida en los años cuarenta que trabaja desde muy joven. Con un empleo estable y un sueldo seguro, pronto se enfrenta a la posibilidad de casarse y tener una familia. Quiere garantizarse una existencia próspera y feliz. ¿Bastará tener un marido, cumplir su jornada laboral, obtener un crédito hipotecario? ¿Por qué el crecimiento económico de una persona o de un país suceden siempre hacia el porvenir y nunca en el presente? ¿Los beneficios financieros aumentan el bienestar social? En medio de la inflación y los ajustes salariales, de la crisis y la deuda, ¿cómo administrará el tiempo, los deseos y los afectos? ¿Existen otras formas de inventar una vida vivible para una mujer trabajadora? Para yolanda segura un poema es una forma de resistencia, una forma de cancelación del valor económico de la lengua.
About the Author and the translator
yolanda segura (Querétaro, 1989) is a lesbian-queer transfeminist writer. She has published four books of poetry, among them serie de circunstancias posibles en torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora (Almadía 2021) per/so/na (Almadía, 2019) and estancias que por ahora tienen luz y se abren hacia el paisaje (Palíndroma, 2021). She won the Premio Nacional de Poesía Carmen Alardín 2018 and the Premio Nacional de Poesía Joven Francisco Cervantes 2017. Her poems, reviews and essays have been published in various magazines and anthologies. She works in series development and screenwriting. She completed her Master's and Ph.D. studies in Literature (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and the Seminar of Photographic Production 2017 at Centro de la Imagen. She studied screenwriting at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica. She lives in Mexico City.
Praise for the book
El libro es un recordatorio y un homenaje; nos permite pensar en las abuelas, en el pasado que nos hace estar aquí y que influye en lo que pensamos y en quienes somos. Nos hace preguntar cuántas mujeres de clase trabajadora nos han permitido escribir y observar y cómo cada vez el camino al bienestar es más estrecho.- El Claustro de Sor Juana
En serie de circunstancias posibles en torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora (Almadía, 2021), más que una denuncia, la poeta piensa en el sentido crítico del poema y del lenguaje: en el caso de la historia de Eloísa, la protagonista del libro, hay una trama personal que termina por definir su propio acceso a la escritura, en especial, al aprovechamiento del lenguaje como una herramienta que va más allá de lo puro comunicativo. - Milenio
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:
