[This text was written for the new blog, Aztlán Reads, to which I’m excited to have been asked to contribute. The blog post is here. Go ahead, leave a comment.] Just as there is a presumption that United States history begins in the east and moves to the west against a savage frontier, so is…
Tag: American literature
Reading Today: Gods Go Begging By Alfredo Véa
For the past couple days, as I read Alfredo Véa’s San Francisco novel Gods Go Begging, I’ve been flashing back to my undergraduate days studying Vietnam in film and literature with Professor John Hellmann at Ohio State. My first impression of Véa’s book is that it’s a great Vietnam novel, a story of physical and…
Reading Today: The Calligraphy of the Witch
Actually I read this book yesterday. Was so into it I didn’t start the review until after it was completed. Like The Hummingbird’s Daughter, I’m reading it with the thought of including it in my Chicana Gothic syllabus. Calligraphy of the Witch by Chicana scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an amazing American novel. It…
Reading Today: The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Today I’ve started the novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. I’m thinking of using it for a class I’m planning (planning in a sense of writing a syllabus, rather than actually having been engaged to teach) on the Chicana/o Gothic. At 499 pages, it seems a bit long, but is actually a fast…