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    Mini Book Review. León de Lidia (Tusquets, 2022) by Myriam Moscona

    Brenda Ortiz · 09/27/2025

    In León de Lidia (Tusquets), Myriam Moscona takes us on a fragmentary and challenging literary journey, where the pieces of a puzzle—stories of grandmothers, defiant aunts, survivors of exile, and echoes of the Holocaust—intertwine with personal and collective memory. Far from being a conventional novel, the book moves between essay, poetry, chronicle, and dream, breaking down the boundaries of genre. With an agile and moving style, Moscona explores orphanhood, migration, Judeo-Spanish, and human fragility, shedding light—both raw and beautiful—on the ...

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    Women Writers and Literary Promoters at the Edge of the Continent

    Adriana Pacheco · 09/20/2025

    The writers and promoters who have built a life in Canada move between four worlds: Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese. After all, these are the languages of our continent. And nothing has taught us more during these months of preparation for our 2025 tour to that country than the fact that writing there is done on the threshold of multilingualism, and that the work, dedication, and passion for literature are not lacking in that beautiful and vast country of the north where migrants build community in the immensity of a multicultural nation.

    Since the beginning of Hablemos, ...

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    Mini Book Review. Lacandona Speed (Literal Publishing, 2025) by Claudia Morales

    Brenda Ortiz · 09/06/2025

    In Lacandona Speed (Literal Publishing, 2025), Chiapas-born writer Claudia Morales returns to the short story with six narratives that travel from a neighborhood in 1980s Mexico City to a dystopian cruise ship bound for Cancún, passing through Chiapas and California. With a vivid style, full of linguistic richness and imagination, the author gives voice to endearing and believable characters that reflect the cultural diversity of her experiences. Inspired both by personal experiences—such as her passion for boxing—and by the literary legacy of her mentor Rafael ...

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    In September: Episode 650 and we’re going to Canada

    Adriana Pacheco · 08/30/2025

    Designing a monthly program of podcasts, events, interviews, and launches requires months of prior organization. Contacting the participants, learning about their profiles, scheduling recording dates, preparing dossiers with the questions to be asked, and then organizing all of this so that it makes sense—this requires a lot of teamwork. That is exactly what we have done at Hablemos Escritoras, which is why we will soon reach 650 episodes in what has already been almost 8 years on the air.

    This milestone in our project gives me the opportunity to thank three indispensable people: my ...

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    Mini Book Review. Terrestre (Literatura Random House, 2025) by Cristina Rivera Garza

    Brenda Ortiz · 08/23/2025

    In Terrestre (Random House, 2025), Cristina Rivera Garza once again blurs the boundaries of literary genres to offer us a radical work, deeply engaged with the body, space, and language. What might at first seem like a collection of stories or travel chronicles quickly becomes an exercise in political and poetic imagination, where terrestrial routes connect not only geographies but also memories, utopias, struggles, and transformations. This book unfolds through journeys—on foot, by train, or by bus—taken by young protagonists moving along unknown paths, often in the ...

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    Mini Book Review. A Daughter's Place (House of Anansi Press,2025) by Martha Bátiz

    Brenda Ortiz · 08/10/2025

    Inspired by the real-life figure of Isabel de Cervantes — the illegitimate daughter of the famed author of Don Quixote — this historical novel transports us to the heart of Spain’s Golden Age to tell the often-invisible stories of the women who surrounded Miguel de Cervantes. With richly detailed prose and a critical eye on the weight of Catholic morality and illegitimacy, Martha Bátiz crafts an intimate, multi-voiced narrative about identity, belonging, and the desire for female autonomy. Through Isabel, Catalina, and the women of the Cervantes family, the author ...

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    Incredible what the summer brought

    Adriana Pacheco · 08/09/2025

    From May to August, 19 new writers and critics joined our encyclopedia, 30 new podcast episodes were released, 16 blog entries were published, 140 new books were added to our library, 165 social media posts were shared, and 16 newsletters were sent out to hundreds of subscribers.

    Now that summer has come to an end and fall is about to begin, our project also enters the semester that will close our seventh year. The continuous, unstoppable, tireless work we do is inspired by the work and paths of so many writers, critics, editors, and translators.

    We turn our gaze back to the "consagradas" ...

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    Mini Book Review. Tu vida en mi vida (Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2024) by Julia Musitano

    Brenda Ortiz · 08/02/2025

    In a time marked by self-centered narratives and identity-based self-affirmation, Tu vida en mi vida bursts forth with a radically different proposal: to conceive of biography as an act of love, as a space of emotional encounter between the biographer and the biographee. Julia Musitano does not limit herself to studying the lives of others from a distant critical stance; instead, she delves with sensitivity and clarity into the zones of contagion and mutual transformation that are activated when one writes about another’s life. The book offers a critical reading of the ...

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    Mini Book Review. Historia feminista de la literatura argentina: Mujeres en revolución. Otros comienzos (EDUVIM, 2022) by Nora Domínguez

    Brenda Ortiz · 07/26/2025

    Published by EDUVIM as part of the ambitious project Historia feminista de la literatura argentina, En la intemperie: poéticas de la fragilidad y la revuelta is a volume that dismantles traditional structures of literary criticism and proposes a collective, affective, and deeply political reading of recent Argentine literature. Directed by Nora Domínguez, Laura Arnés, and María José Punte, this book rejects any pretense of totality and embraces fragmentation, remnants, and noise as forms of resistance against the cisheteropatriarchal canon. From ...

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    Mini Book Review. Cocodrilos (BUAP, Sial Pigmalión, 2024) by Magali Velasco

    Brenda Ortiz · 07/19/2025

    Cocodrilos, by Veracruz writer and academic Magali Velasco Vargas, is a noir novel that transcends the boundaries of its genre to become an act of remembrance, a denunciation, and an elegy for those who no longer have a voice. Recipient of an honorable mention in the IV Ibero-American Novel and Short Story Contest Ventosa-Arrufat and Fundación Elena Poniatowska Amor A.C., the work stands as a literary document that not only narrates but also confronts. Set in the port city of Veracruz during the bloodiest years of Javier Duarte de Ochoa’s administration (2010–2016), ...

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    Mini Book Review. Mujeres de ojos grandes (Seix barral, 2021) by Ángeles Mastretta

    Brenda Ortiz · 07/12/2025

    Mujeres de ojos grandes is a delicate and powerful collection of short stories in which Ángeles Mastretta gives voice to a group of women who, despite having been raised under traditional norms of marriage, motherhood, and obedience, rebel against those molds to assert themselves with determination and sensitivity. Through brief and memorable stories — such as those of aunts Daniela, Élidé, Marcela, or Fernanda — Mastretta paints a feminine universe full of intelligence, desire, strength, and freedom. Each story functions as an intimate portrait in ...

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    Mini Book Review. Aunque me extinga (Candaya, 2024) by Sofía Crespo Madrid

    Brenda Ortiz · 07/05/2025

    Aunque me extinga is a poetry collection of great emotional and political depth that takes a strong place within contemporary poetry written from the perspective of displacement. Sofía Crespo Madrid, a Venezuelan poet and translator based in Spain, constructs in this book an intimate and collective song about migration, exile, loss, and love as a transformative force. Written during the process of regularizing her migratory status, this set of poems also functions as a poetic diary of transit—a logbook of waiting, pain, memory, and hope. Throughout its pages, Crespo ...

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    The Wonderful Month of July and Bringing Hablemos, escritoras to Life

    Adriana Pacheco · 06/28/2025

    I am so thrilled to announce the program for the month ahead. It’s like discovering a surprise that has been quietly growing and is finally ready to come into the light.

    Programming a project like ours is a labor of love — intricate, delicate, and months in the making. It all begins with the generosity of writers and the promoters, editors, or cultural managers who open their doors to us. Once that door is open, together we build an audio repository, a living voice encyclopedia, a magazine of interviews, a catalog of books, and so much more. The idea is to bring everything ...

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    Mini Book Review. Puro paisaje (LaCriba, 2023) by Lourdes Vázquez

    Brenda Ortiz · 06/21/2025

    Puro paisaje, by Puerto Rican poet and storyteller Lourdes Vázquez, is a dazzling mosaic of sixteen stories that weave together the intimate, the urban, and the fantastic with poetic, sensual, and incisive language. Each tale is a narrative filigree that invites us to journey through settings ranging from San Juan to New York, with stops in Barcelona, Miami, and Orlando, confronting landscapes shaped by desire, memory, violence, exile, otherness, and female resistance. With great mastery, Vázquez plays with form and tone: from the erotic to the Caribbean ...

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    Mini Book Review. Autobiografía de la piel (Alfaguara, 2025) by Ana Clavel

    Brenda Ortiz · 06/14/2025

    With Autobiography of the Skin, Ana Clavel offers us a deeply intimate and daring work that challenges the boundaries of traditional narrative. Here, the skin—our most symbolic and sensory organ—does not merely feel; it also remembers, desires, and above all, speaks. Through a style that moves between autofiction, the poetics of the body, and a philosophical exploration of desire, Clavel creates a shared “we” between author and body, a sensual complicity that becomes literature. The novel is a layered narrative exercise: the skin as a literary character, the ...

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    A blue little suitcase

    Adriana Pacheco · 06/07/2025

    Today I’m going to tell you about a little blue suitcase that filled one of the most beautiful bookstores you’ll ever see—Lattice, in the city of Puebla, Mexico. The little suitcase was brought by Mexican writer María de Lourdes Victoria, and the ship that carried it all the way to Puebla was Renée Carvajal’s diffusion project on Instagram, Escape_de_letras, with over 40,000 followers. This project played a key role in the presentation of a touching, loving, harsh, and charming book that tells the story of a group of children—many ...

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    June on Hablemos, escritoras: Unusual, Caribbean, Critical, and Borderland Voices

    Brenda Ortiz · 05/31/2025

    This June on Hablemos, escritoras we are thrilled to feature three of our audience's favorite sections, bringing together a powerful selection of voices that cross geographies, literary genres, and cultural borders. From Spain, our Insólitas section welcomes renowned scholar Carmen Alemany, who coined the term "unusual" to describe a rising literary trend that breaks away from traditional molds. In a conversation led by Teresa López-Pellisa, we delve into a narrative universe where the strange and the marvelous find new forms of expression.

    From Puerto ...

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    The fire of Rosario Castellanos’s words still burns

    Adriana Pacheco · 05/24/2025

    Materia que arde by Sara Uribe, with illustrations by Verónica Gerber and published by Lumen in 2023, is one of the most beautiful books ever written about Rosario Castellanos. Today, we return to it and to a fragment of the review Fran Dennstedt wrote in June 2023 about this remarkable book, in which Uribe weaves together fragments of Castellanos’s work—poems, letters, essays—with her own personal reflections and questions. In doing so, she creates a narrative and intimacy that invites the reader to get to know the author from a contemporary and close perspective. ...

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    Cartas de Wisconsin. A Translation by Nancy Jean Ross

    Adriana Pacheco · 05/17/2025

    The urgency of translating Rosario Castellanos into English grows day by day—not only in this centennial year of her birth, but always—as her work becomes increasingly relevant and timely. The work of scholars like Nancy Jean Ross, who are translating and publishing Castellanos’s writings, is helping her voice cross linguistic borders. The life of the migrant, the difficulty of adapting to small American towns, as well as nostalgia, depression, and loneliness, are some of the many themes she explores in her letters. A prime example can be found in the prestigious journal ...

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    A woman of words and “The Mothers—What Do They Think?”

    Adriana Pacheco · 05/10/2025

    For years, Andrea Reyes dedicated herself to tracking down the essays of Rosario Castellanos that were published in magazines, at events and ceremonies, or in outlets like the newspaper Excélsior, where she began publishing in 1963. Initially compiled in three volumes, Mujer de palabras has now been reissued in two books that include 334 essays, in addition to the 64 from El uso de la palabra, which had been excluded from Castellanos’s collected works published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. The original edition was reprinted several times by Conaculta in 2004, ...

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    The title Balún Canán refers to a mythical Mayan city

    Adriana Pacheco · 05/03/2025

    Published in 1957, Balún Canán, is a fundamental work in Mexican literature. Written by the great narrator, poet, and essayist Rosario Castellanos, is set in the state of Chiapas during the post-revolutionary period, a time marked by profound social, economic, and political changes. Its structure alternates between the perspective of a nameless young girl and an omniscient narrator, portraying the life of a landowning family of European descent facing the decline of their power amid agrarian reforms and indigenous uprisings. Traditionally included among the required ...

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    In May We Celebrate Rosario Castellanos

    Adriana Pacheco · 04/26/2025

    Our summer season begins with a major literary celebration: the 100th anniversary of Rosario Castellanos. We have dedicated an entire month to her, with conversations featuring critics who have specialized in her work. Andrea Reyes joins us from the United States to talk about her essays. From Vancouver, we speak with Nancy Jean Ross about the letters the Chiapanecan writer sent to Ricardo Guerra and others. From Mexico, we welcome two voices: the critic Maricruz Castro Ricalde, who discusses the representations of Castellanos and her works in film, and the writer Diana del Ángel, ...

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    Mini Book Review.Vladimir C. El vigilante del campo de mostaza (Mantis, 2023) by Iris Kiya (under the heteronym Milton Steiner)

    Brenda Ortiz · 04/19/2025

    In Vladimir C., the Watchman of the Mustard Field (Editorial Mantis, 2023), Iris Kiya offers a work that defies all labels. Through a fragmentary structure that blends letters, anecdotes, photographs, drawings, and poetic epigraphs, the novel presents a deeply sensory literary experience, almost tactile, where the image is both the beginning and the end. Signed under the heteronym Milton Steiner —one of the author's several alter egos— this short but intense novel explores the relationship between two exiles, Vladimir and Steiner, between memory and the desire to claim ...

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    Mini Book Review. Las indignas (Alfaguara, 2023) by Agustina Bazterrica

    Brenda Ortiz · 04/12/2025

    Las indignas, the third novel by Agustina Bazterrica, is a work that unfolds a disturbing dystopia set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by environmental catastrophes. In this oppressive setting, a group of women lives confined in a convent ruled with brutality by a Mother Superior and spiritually subjected to the figure of Él (Him), a holy man whose face is never seen. Through an anonymous narrator who secretly writes using rudimentary means, the novel reveals the daily routines, punishments, and inner resistances within this oppressive society. Bazterrica weaves together ...

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