LETRAS

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

Fruto de más de medio siglo de dedicación a la poesía, este volumen reúne la obra en verso de Álvaro Salvador, uno de los autores más sólidos y coherentes de su generación. Editada e introducida por Gracia Morales, que recorre en su texto preliminar el itinerario y las claves de su poética, la recopilación incluye una selección de sus primeros libros y los ocho publicados entre Las cortezas del fruto (1980) y Un cielo sin salida (2020), a los que se añade el hasta ahora inédito Aguaparra, un poemario donde se conjugan magistralmente la más afilada actualidad con el ejercicio pausado de la memoria. Como escribió Ángel González, «la poesía de Álvaro Salvador no se limita a ser relato, inventario o recuento de la vida. En ella el recuento es más bien reencuentro, recapitulación –ordenación y valoración– de todas esas cosas, actividad imaginativa de la memoria que hace del inventario una invención equivalente a un descubrimiento.

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.