Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for money, only to find that his work was unpublishable because the dictator whose reign it portrayed had given way to an even more cruel and oppressive one. When he finally self-published the novel in Mexico in 1946, it was riddled with typographical errors, and a definitive edition did not appear until 1952.
From the beginning, then, El Señor Presidente has been star-crossed. But it also ranks as one of the most important and influential works of modern Latin American literature, a kind of urtext for the celebrated generation of novelists that followed Asturias and gained global recognition in the 1960s and 1970s as members of “El Boom”: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Augusto Roa Bastos, and several others.
Usually, there are clear answers in mathematics—especially if the tasks are not too complicated. But when it comes to the Sleeping Beauty problem, which became popular in 2000, there is still no universal consensus. Experts in philosophy and mathematics split into two camps and ceaselessly cite—often quite convincingly—arguments for their respective side. More than 100 technical publications exist on this puzzle, and almost every person who hears about the Sleeping Beauty thought experiment develops their own strong opinion.
Link’s short stories may be infused with elements of multiple genres and literary influences, but her originality and idiosyncratic imagination defy classification or comparison. She places herself simply in “the long tradition of the weird,” an amorphous category broadly defined by the presence of “something in this story that you don’t expect.”
Anchoring their work in elemental life routines, the four artists explore the sensuous materiality of existential vacillation and survival. Caught between the fixity of endless reiteration or seriality, and the movements of art and life, their intimate explorations focus on small and ordinary yet radical—that is, fundamental, principial—gestures that betray existential vulnerability and display artistic experimentation in transformative, indeed political, ways. It is the starkness of their uncompromising oeuvre that stings or pricks me, the lusciousness of their rigor, which relentlessly reasserts the shared paradoxical condition of women: that of being simultaneously free and alienated.
what makes a house
a home is difficult
to define, as not just
any walls of plaster or stucco
or brick can hold