LETRAS

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. Lured by the promise of a big payday, she quits teaching and moves to L.A. to turn the novel into an action flick with the help of some studio hacks. But as she's pressured to change her main character from a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Threats appear in the screenplay; siren calls lure Penelope’s co-writers into danger. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her mermaid come to life, enacting revenge for Hollywood’s violations? American Mermaid follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a ruthless industry town, where she discovers a beating heart in her own fiction, a mermaid who will fight to move between worlds without giving up her voice. A hilarious story about deep things, American Mermaid asks how far we’ll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale.

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find her house eerily quiet. Her mother is missing. Nothing else is out of place. There is no sign of struggle. Her mom’s pocketbook remains in the front hall, in its usual spot.   So begins a mystery that will span a lifetime. What happened to Jane Larkin?   Investigators suspect Jane’s husband. A criminal defense attorney, Dan Larkin would surely be an expert in outfoxing the police.   But no evidence is found linking him to a crime, and the case fades from the public’s memory, a simmering, unresolved riddle. Jane’s three children—Alex, Jeff, and Miranda—are left to be raised by the man who may have murdered their mother.   Two decades later, the remains of Jane Larkin are found. The investigation is awakened. The children, now grown, are forced to choose sides. With their father or against him? Guilty or innocent? And what happens if they are wrong?

En plena crisis de madurez, Bennie Salazar, que en los setenta formó parte de una banda punk y ahora es un alto ejecutivo de la decadente industria discográfica, se echa copos de oro en el café para recuperar el apetito sexual. Sasha, su asistente, después de haber viajado mucho y no siempre en circunstancias felices, se trata de su cleptomanía con un psicoanalista que viste jerséis estrambóticos. En torno a ellos se despliega una variopinta red de personajes, desde una relaciones públicas que intenta lavarle la cara a un general genocida hasta un periodista que ha estado en prisión por abusar de una estrella de cine adolescente. Con el rock palpitando en cada una de sus páginas, El tiempo es un canalla es un entramado fascinador que pasa por lugares como Nueva York, San Francisco, Kenia, Nápoles o el desierto de California, y cubre un período que va de los años setenta hasta el 2020.

El fuego ha arrasado Moscú y una turba furiosa busca culpables. Vasia, acusada de brujería, es la candidata perfecta. El gran príncipe forma alianzas con quienes tal vez lo conduzcan a la guerra y la ruina, mientras que el rey del invierno ve cómo su poder va debilitándose a medida que se acerca el verano. Y entretanto, sobre todos ellos se cierne la sombra de un antiguo demonio. Para proteger a los suyos y el mundo mágico que tanto atesora, Vasia tendrá que recurrir a la ayuda tanto de amigos como de viejos enemigos. Pero es posible que no pueda salvarlos a todos, ni siquiera a sí misma. Porque, como es bien sabido, la magia enloquece a la gente. Y al cambiar la realidad siempre puedes acabar olvidándote de lo que es real. El invierno de la bruja es el final de la trilogía de El oso y el ruiseñor, una fascinante serie ambientada en la Rusia medieval que ha entusiasmado a los lectores en más de veinte idiomas.

Estos poemas los encontró Inmaculada Pelegrín (Lorca, 1969) una mañana de enero en un lugar llamado Farrera con vistas al Alto Pirineo. Por esta circunstancia no debe extrañar que, al leerlos, huelan a hierba y a pan de centeno o se escuche, de fondo, bramar un cabirol. Fue imprescindible, para que ocurriera, que estuviesen por allí Fernando Carreter, conductor de diligencias; su hijo Saúl, descifrador de contraseñas; y Tito Pedro, un ermitaño sabio que los acogió en su eschatia. Aunque debatieron mucho sobre el tema, ninguno se atreve a afirmar si cuando decimos la teoría de las cosas nos estamos refiriendo a que nosotros tenemos una teoría sobre las cosas o a que las cosas tienen su propia teoría sobre el mundo.