RON JACOBS applauds a reading of black history in the US that plots the path from autonomy to self-governance and then liberation
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Letters From Latin America
Fiction and poetry from Argentinean, Mexican, Latinx and Ecuadorean writers
TOM KING relishes an enlightening history of the checkered progress of the war that humanity has waged on bacteria
ANDY HEDGECOCK is intrigued by a scholarly account of how systemic disinformation can exacerbate the perception of threat and foster hatred
New releases from Cuban pianist Aruan Ortiz, trumpeter Kenny Dorham, and London pianist Geoff Castle
GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
WILL STONE applauds a comprehensive survey of love in its many moods and musical forms
IT’S entirely fitting that The Scent of Buenos Aires (Archipelago Books, £18), the first collection of short stories by Argentinian writer Hebe Uhart to be translated into English, has the reproduction of a painting by Xul Solar on its cover.
The Argentinian visual artist was not only a great painter, sculptor and writer but an inventor of imaginary languages and it is possible to deduce that from Uhart’s well-crafted short stories with their strange narratives exploring the oddities and mysteries of daily life with a new and simple language.
Always revealing, these witty and sometimes cryptic tales are mostly set in Buenos Aires by a writer’s writer who has an acute eye for the uncanny and the mundane.
More from this author
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
LEO BOIX reviews a novella by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia, and poetry by Peruvian Giancarlo Huapaya, and Chilean Elvira Hernandez
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
LEO BOIX salutes the revelation that British art has always had a queer pulse, long before the term became cultural currency
