Larry Rohter | The New York Review of Books

Chasing Ghosts

With its brilliant prose and unrelenting darkness and pessimism, José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night towers over Chilean literature.

The Obscene Bird of Night

by José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, and Megan McDowell, with an introduction by Alejandro Zambra.

February 26, 2026 issue

In the Heart of Bahia

Itamar Vieira Junior’s first novel, Crooked Plow, tells a story of suffering, resistance, revenge, and redemption set in the impoverished, arid Brazilian Northeast.

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz

June 6, 2024 issue

Searching for the True Brazil

The writer Mário de Andrade advocated a lusty embrace of the indigenous elements of Brazilian culture.

Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character

by Mário de Andrade, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson

The Apprentice Tourist: Travels Along the Amazon to Peru, Along the Madeira to Bolivia, and Around Marajó Before Saying Enough Already

by Mário de Andrade, translated from the Portuguese and with an introduction and notes by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

Amar, Verbo Intransitivo/ To Love, Intransitive Verb

by Mário de Andrade, translated from the Portuguese by Ana Lessa-Schmidt

October 5, 2023 issue

The Inventor of Magical Realism

It remains a mystery why Miguel Ángel Asturias’s brilliant novel Mr. President remains less well known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired.

Mr. President

by Miguel Ángel Asturias, translated from the Spanish by David Unger, with a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa and an introduction by Gerald Martin

May 25, 2023 issue

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

Harsh Times

by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West

February 23, 2023 issue

An Eternal Symbol of Black Resistance

Gayl Jones’s novel Palmares sees the legendary Brazilian slave haven as a story to which all descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the Americas can lay claim.

Palmares

by Gayl Jones

Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho

by Gayl Jones

June 23, 2022 issue

Another New World

Claudio Lomnitz’s Nuestra América is an account of his Ashkenazi Jewish family’s persistent, sometimes bewildered search across four continents for a language, culture, identity, and place they can call their own.

Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation

by Claudio Lomnitz

June 10, 2021 issue

Brazil’s Dead End

Brazil Apart: 1964–2019

by Perry Anderson

The Edge of Democracy

a documentary film by Petra Costa

O Mecanismo [The Mechanism]

a television series created by José Padilha and Elena Soarez

April 23, 2020 issue

Brazil’s Brutal Messiah

Brazil: A Biography

by Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, translated from the Portuguese

December 6, 2018 issue

Viva Tropicália!

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium

an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, October 1, 2016–January 2, 2017; the Art Institute of Chicago, February 19–May 7, 2017; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, July 14–October 1, 2017

September 28, 2017 issue

Rio: The War of the Favelas

Misha Glenny’s ‘Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio’

Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio

by Misha Glenny

May 12, 2016 issue

A Man of the Amazon

June 7, 2012 issue