Congratulations to Jeffrey Lawrence, Professor of English, for writing and publishing the new book: "El Americano".
Jeffrey is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (2018) and the translator of Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America (2016) and Sergio Chejfec’s Forgotten Manuscript (2023). His first novel, El americano, was published by Chatos Inhumanos press in 2024.
El Americano Description:
What do we do with Americans who are constructed in our language? Where do we put those who adopt a cultural tradition that in principle does not suit them? What do we do with Americans who are constructed in our language? Where do we put those who adopt a cultural tradition that in principle does not suit them? would it belong, being its inherited culture the one that, for centuries, has exercised domination over the acquired one? This gringo, this Yankee, this American becomes an uncomfortable subject, who speaks a Spanish that is delocalized, untranslatable and changing depending on the circumstances. El Americano is Jeffrey Lawrence's sharp criticism and broad reflection on the complexities and disruptions that cultural subjects like Hemingway and himself pose in the Latin American literary field. In this autofictional novel, the love for literature, the desire to learn and the candor trigger an entire vital journey through the Hispanic world that ends up becoming the basis of the identity of a writer-Frankenstein: built of cultural fragments, difficult to categorize , threatening, but also immensely tender and fascinating.
This is a novel in which the North and the South look at each other's faces and smile anxiously. Halfway between Roberto Bolaño and Ben Lerner, The American installs an intruder in the heart of Latin America and from there begins to question everything. Carlos Fonseca.
More Information: Here
