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 by Mexican authors Juan Pablo Villalobos and Fernanda Melchor and by Dominican writer and singer-songwriter Rita Indiana
FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH: Rita Indiana
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
READING the Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos's latest book I Don't Expect Anyone To Believe Me (And Other Stories, £11.99) is like entering into a fantastical world so powerful and mesmerising that its almost impossible to leave it.
Masterly translated by Daniel Hahn and a well-deserved winner of the prestigious Herralde Prize, the novel is as witty and entertaining as it is thought-provoking. It involves the story of desperate immigrants, literature students and violent gangsters in contemporary Barcelona. But it’s much more than that.
Villalobos is highly successful in conveying a world where endemic corruption, organised crime, state violence, the dividing line between fiction and reality and the limits of humour in literature get crazier as the story progresses.
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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
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LEO BOIX salutes the revelation that British art has always had a queer pulse, long before the term became cultural currency
