Ilan Stavans

The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today's preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his...

The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popol Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were being threatened with destruction by European conquest and Christianity, it was written down in verse by members of the K’iche’ nobility in what is today Guatemala. In 1701, that text was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar and ethnographer before vanishing...

Enough with the dead white men! Forget what you learned in school! Ever since Columbus --who was probably a converted Jew -- "discovered" the New World, the powerful and privileged have usurped American history. The true story of the United States lies not with the founding fathers or robber barons, but with the country's most overlooked and marginalized peoples: the workers, immigrants, housewives, and slaves who built America from the ground up...

Writers from around the world provide essays, stories, poems and artwork detailing the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh...

Includes the work of 201 Latino writers from the Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American traditions, as well as from the traditions of other Spanish-speaking countries. It traces five centuries of writing, from letters to the Spanish crown by sixteenth-century conquistadors to the cutting-edge expressions of twenty-first-century cartoonistas and artists of reggaetón.

A one-of-a-kind, uplifting picture book about a Jewish boy and a Palestinian boy who bond on the soccer field-translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Daniel and Ismail, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, don't know each other yet, but they have more in common than they know. They live in the same city and have the same birthday, and this year they get the same presents: a traditional scarf-for Daniel a tallit and for Ismail a keffiyeh-and...