Friday, July 25, 2025

New Literature About a Pair of Icons of Resistance

Presenting two very different books, about two very different people. And yet ... Are you resisting? Need role models?  Inspiration?  Resurgence of hope?  Then these books should be on your TBR pile.  

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Mafalda: Book One
Quino
 
Translated by Frank Wynne
Elsewhere Editions -- June 10, 2025

[from the publisher]
Six-year-old Mafalda loves democracy and hates soup. What democratic sector do cats fall into? she asks, then unfurls a toilet paper red carpet and gives her very own presidential address. Mafalda’s precociousness and passion stump all grown-ups around her. Dissident and rebellious, she refuses to abandon the world to her parents’ generation, who seem so lost.

Alongside the irascible Mafalda, readers will meet her eclectic entourage: dreamy Felipe and gossipy Susanita, young-capitalist Manolito and rebellious Miguelito. You can clearly see Mafalda is small, when she is dreaming in bed or soaring on a swing — “As usual, as soon as you put your feet on the ground, the fun finishes,” Mafalda grumbles — but her hopes for the world and her heart are as huge as can be. Generations of readers have discovered themselves in Mafalda’s boundlessly adventurous spirit, and learned to question, rebel, and hope.

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Edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguín
Edinburgh University Press - July 31, 2025

[from the publisher]
Luis Rodríguez is a prominent Latinx poet, memoirist and activist renowned for his candid visceral accounts of urban working-class life that includes youth gang violence, incarceration and drug abuse, grueling factory work and union organizing activities and collective approaches to redemption and political empowerment, which have resonated across multiple communities in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, whilst Rodríguez has been the focus of some critical scholarship, huge segments of his life, work and legacy remain unexamined. This anthology has commissioned new and unique critical essays and reflections on Rodríguez’s life and works, putting forward new ideas about bringing the voices of 'barrio organic intellectuals' to the fore. The anthology deliberately includes traditional academics as well as more public intellectuals and creative writers from across Europe and the Americas to reflect Rodriguez’s own diverse outputs as a prisoner author and activist.

Later.
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Manuel Ramos writes crime fiction.

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