<![CDATA[EL PAÍS]]>

<![CDATA[EL PAÍS]]>https://english.elpais.comWed, 03 Jun 2026 16:53:00 +0000en1hourly1<![CDATA[Luis Rafael Sánchez: ‘Republicans can’t stand the idea of Puerto Rico becoming a US state’]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-05-23/luis-rafael-sanchez-republicans-cant-stand-the-idea-of-puerto-rico-becoming-a-us-state.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-05-23/luis-rafael-sanchez-republicans-cant-stand-the-idea-of-puerto-rico-becoming-a-us-state.htmlSat, 23 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000April 23, World Book Day. A morning of brilliant Caribbean sunshine in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and across the island. Luis Rafael Sánchez, 89, the most important living writer in Puerto Rico, who will turn 90 next November, suggests beginning the conversation — later to continue on the cozy terrace‑balcony of his home — at a discreet and elegant restaurant, where everything seems to pause when the staff catch sight of “Wico,” the affectionate nickname by which the writer is known on the island.

]]>Steph Segarra<![CDATA[From the ‘Prince of Puerto Rican letters’ to Bad Bunny: the urgency of reclaiming Puerto Rico as a linguistic and cultural affirmation]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-05-12/from-the-prince-of-puerto-rican-letters-to-bad-bunny-the-urgency-of-reclaiming-puerto-rico-as-a-linguistic-and-cultural-affirmation.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2026-05-12/from-the-prince-of-puerto-rican-letters-to-bad-bunny-the-urgency-of-reclaiming-puerto-rico-as-a-linguistic-and-cultural-affirmation.htmlTue, 12 May 2026 14:01:21 +0000It’s common for Puerto Rico to be overlooked when the topic is its literature. Both in Spain and Latin America, its literary production remains largely unknown despite its power and quality. With few exceptions, due to editorial policies, what is written in Puerto Rico stays in Puerto Rico. The neglect is widespread. In a book as emblematic as Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano doesn’t mention the island even once. Needless to say, there was no intention to offend. It’s simply a matter of invisibility. Often, perhaps too often, Puerto Rico is simply left out.

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]]>Christina House,Edu Bayer<![CDATA[Being ‘American’]]>https://english.elpais.com/opinion/2026-01-02/being-american.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/opinion/2026-01-02/being-american.htmlFri, 02 Jan 2026 12:22:44 +0000When, 40 years ago, in December 1985, I first set foot in New York, I wasn’t aware that I had just embarked on a one-way journey. Without intending to, the center of gravity of my life had shifted forever to the other side of the Atlantic, which I have since crossed some three hundred times. Two-thirds of my life have been spent in New York, a city that has indelibly marked me: here I earned a doctorate in literature, won a professorship at an elite college, and was publicly born as a writer with a novel that won the Nadal Prize in 2006, Call Me Brooklyn. That same year, I was appointed director of the Cervantes Institute in the city, a position I held until 2011. Since arriving, I have closely observed American culture through a dual lens: observing the state of the Spanish language and the current state of U.S. literature. Decade after decade I have been reporting on both issues through the pages of this newspaper.

]]>Enrique Flores<![CDATA[How New York resisted the rise of fascism in the 1930s... and how it’s standing up to Trump today]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-11-04/how-new-york-resisted-the-rise-of-fascism-in-the-1930s-and-how-its-standing-up-to-trump-today.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-11-04/how-new-york-resisted-the-rise-of-fascism-in-the-1930s-and-how-its-standing-up-to-trump-today.htmlTue, 04 Nov 2025 10:00:14 +0000New York has never been just New York, argues historian Mike Wallace in Gotham At War, which hit bookstores just weeks before the city’s mayoral elections — set to take place this Tuesday and, according to all polls, likely to be won by Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, Muslim, and socialist. Those circumstances give particular weight to the title Wallace chose for his book.

]]>Science & Society Picture Library<![CDATA[The American cultural boom a century on: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Louis Armstrong ]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-04-04/the-american-cultural-boom-a-century-on-hemingway-fitzgerald-dos-passos-and-louis-armstrong.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-04-04/the-american-cultural-boom-a-century-on-hemingway-fitzgerald-dos-passos-and-louis-armstrong.htmlFri, 04 Apr 2025 17:40:07 +0000In George Steiner’s first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Steiner promotes the theory that the two great literary traditions of the 19th century – the golden age of the genre – had nowhere left to go: the European in general and the Russian in particular. With Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, Zola, Stendhal, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, a point of perfection had been reached, but also of saturation. How to continue with a universal vision? Steiner asks himself. He finds the answer on the other side of the Atlantic with the explosion of North American literature.

]]>GETTY IMAGES<![CDATA[The election will be televised: 70 years of TV ads for US voters ]]>https://english.elpais.com/usa/elections/2024-11-02/the-election-will-be-televised-70-years-of-tv-ads-for-us-voters.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/usa/elections/2024-11-02/the-election-will-be-televised-70-years-of-tv-ads-for-us-voters.htmlSun, 03 Nov 2024 04:00:00 +0000Political Advertisements 1952-2024 is a fascinating political video art project for which the seed was planted four decades ago. The year was 1984, when Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale to win re-election and the Spanish-born, United States-based post-conceptual artist Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) began to collaborate with U.S. creative Marshall Reese (Washington D.C., 1955) on an investigation of television spots paid for by the Democratic and Republican Parties, beginning from when the first such TV ads appeared in 1952. Their birth coincided with the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower’s winning campaign, powered by his famous slogan, “I Like Ike.” Eisenhower occupied the White House for eight years, a period characterized by McCarthyism, which brought with it political witch hunts and anti-communist obsession. The birth of televised electioneering in 1952 was only to evolve every four years, its most recent form taking shape during Kamala Harris’s current electoral battle against Donald Trump.

]]><![CDATA[Luis Alberto Urrea, novelist and essayist: ‘Trump made the border a theater of horrors’ ]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-07-20/luis-alberto-urrea-novelist-and-essayist-trump-made-the-border-a-theater-of-horrors.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-07-20/luis-alberto-urrea-novelist-and-essayist-trump-made-the-border-a-theater-of-horrors.htmlSat, 20 Jul 2024 04:05:00 +0000Luis Alberto Urrea, 68, is one of the most important Hispanic-American storytellers of our time. He’s part of an extraordinarily diverse literary tradition, whose hallmarks — despite the diverse origins of its members — demonstrate a solid unity. This is due to a presence which is both symbolic and real: Spanish. It’s a language that many of them have lost, but which continues to shape — even in its absence — their literary vision.

]]>JPBody<![CDATA[In the ‘morgue’ of ‘The New York Times’]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-06-11/in-the-morgue-of-the-new-york-times.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-06-11/in-the-morgue-of-the-new-york-times.htmlTue, 11 Jun 2024 10:59:56 +0000When the novelist John Barth died last April, The New York Times published an obituary signed by two journalists, Dwight Garner, a renowned literary critic, and Michael T. Kaufman, who, as clarified in a note, had died in 2010 — in other words, 14 years before Barth himself. Kaufman had written what is known in Times journalism parlance as an “advance obituary.” Garner’s mission was to finish off what Kaufman had prepared. The best profile ever written about an obituary writer is probably Mr. Bad News, published in Esquire magazine in 1966 by Gay Talese. In Mr. Bad News, Talese says that the newspaper’s morgue — as he calls the obituary section — contains some 2,000 advance obituaries on file, all of them duly written and updated, just waiting for the protagonist of the obituary in question to pass away so that the circumstances of their death could be added. Mr. Bad News was Alden Whitman, author of half a thousand obituaries on some of the most famous people of his time. Whitman died suddenly in 1990 at the age of 76 at the Paris Hotel in Monte Carlo, where he had gone with his wife, Joan, to celebrate the 70th birthday of a Times colleague, who was a culinary specialist.

]]>STEPHEN HILTNER <![CDATA[New York turns 400-years-old in silence and with a Latin accent]]>https://english.elpais.com/opinion/2024-05-23/new-york-turns-400-years-old-in-silence-and-with-a-latin-accent.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/opinion/2024-05-23/new-york-turns-400-years-old-in-silence-and-with-a-latin-accent.htmlThu, 23 May 2024 06:02:00 +0000It has been 400 years since the founding of what is now New York City, which took place in the spring of 1624. While it would be logical for the anniversary to be a cause for celebration, the truth is that the occasion is almost going unnoticed. One exception, however, is an exhibition titled New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam. It’s a tiny display that occupies a corner of the lobby in the New York Historical Society, an elegant neo-Roman style building located in front of the west side of Central Park.

]]>Alexander Spatari<![CDATA[In the midst of his battle against cancer, Paul Auster publishes a novel of enormous human and literary value ]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-11-07/in-the-midst-of-his-battle-against-cancer-paul-auster-publishes-a-novel-of-enormous-human-and-literary-value.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-11-07/in-the-midst-of-his-battle-against-cancer-paul-auster-publishes-a-novel-of-enormous-human-and-literary-value.htmlTue, 07 Nov 2023 19:58:30 +0000It feels like an obituary, written by the protagonist of a life whose end looms near. Last March, the writer Siri Hustvedt, wife of Paul Auster, announced that the author had cancer. Among the 18 novels penned by the American writer (New Jersey, 1947), the last one, Baumgartner, recently published in the United States, surprises with its emotional depth and the simplicity of its narrative range. It is as if it contained a distilled mix of everything that the author ever included in his celebrated body of work. After playing with all the registers available to fiction, exploring its limits, Baumgartner condenses five decades of narrative wisdom. In only 200 pages, Paul Auster’s latest novel contains subtle echoes of many of his previous stories, mimicking the dance of death executed in Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), a book where Auster says goodbye to the ghosts of literary creation that had been his characters.

]]>Pascal Perich<![CDATA[Cormac McCarthy, the end of an era in American literature]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-06-19/cormac-mccarthy-the-end-of-an-era-in-american-literature.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-06-19/cormac-mccarthy-the-end-of-an-era-in-american-literature.htmlMon, 19 Jun 2023 10:28:39 +0000Cormac McCarthy’s death marks the end of an era in the recent history of American literature. Without the slightest doubt, its effect will be felt on a global scale. The author of Blood Meridian opened new paths beyond the borders of his country. The relentless plasticity and brutal beauty of his stories were reflected in indelible images that easily adapted to the language of cinema. McCarthy’s stories are an invitation to gaze into an uncomfortable abyss that can be dangerous because it reflects the darkest side of the human condition. His death leaves a void that makes us wonder about the future of literature in general and American letters in particular.

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]]>Gilles Peress (Magnum Photos / ContactoPhoto)<![CDATA[Cormac McCarthy, the great novelist of the darkest America, has died]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-06-13/cormac-mccarthy-the-great-novelist-of-the-darkest-america-has-died.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-06-13/cormac-mccarthy-the-great-novelist-of-the-darkest-america-has-died.htmlTue, 13 Jun 2023 20:45:20 +0000American writer Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89. His death was announced in a statement from his publisher, Penguin Random House, which did not give a specific cause. McCarthy explored the dark side of human nature in a dozen poetic and moving novels. Some of his outstanding novels include The Road, No Country for Old Men, The Passenger or Stella Maris.

]]>Gilles Peress / Magnum Photos / ContactoPhoto<![CDATA[The inventor of capitalist realism is an Argentine who writes in English ]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-03-16/the-inventor-of-capitalist-realism-is-an-argentine-who-writes-in-english.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-03-16/the-inventor-of-capitalist-realism-is-an-argentine-who-writes-in-english.htmlThu, 16 Mar 2023 22:44:52 +0000Our interview takes place in a secluded café behind the public library in Brooklyn Heights, a New York neighborhood that was once the home of literary giants like Walt Whitman, W. H. Auden, Hart Crane, Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, Paul Bowles and Norman Mailer. Before sitting down, Argentina-born Hernán Díaz affably says, “I prefer to talk about books and literature instead of my own life.” Recognizing the unavoidable, he offers a few brief autobiographical notes. “I was born in a house full of books. In fact, my parents owned a bookstore, so literature was a compelling presence in my life from the beginning. After the 1975 coup, we went into exile in Sweden. I was two years old.” Díaz flashes forward to steer the conversation to a more comfortable subject. “That was where I started writing stories and poems. They were terrible, but I always knew I would dedicate my life to literature... Years later, when democracy returned to Argentina, we were able to go home to Buenos Aires. I studied literature at the university and earned my degree quickly.” Hernán Díaz, who speaks a Spanish vernacular unmistakably rooted in Buenos Aires, is the editor of the prestigious Revista Hispánica Moderna, a century-old Spanish-language academic journal published under the auspices of Columbia University (New York). That vocation makes it all the more surprising that he chose to write in English, his second language. Like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad before him, he has a native speaker’s mastery of the language.

]]><![CDATA[Colleen Hoover: The world’s bestselling author hails from a ranch in Texas ]]>https://english.elpais.com/eps/2023-02-26/colleen-hoover-the-worlds-bestselling-author-hails-from-a-ranch-in-texas.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/eps/2023-02-26/colleen-hoover-the-worlds-bestselling-author-hails-from-a-ranch-in-texas.htmlSun, 26 Feb 2023 11:18:37 +0000The first signs that something unusual was afoot in the book world began a decade ago and came to a head during the pandemic, when many sought refuge in reading. Little by little, an unknown woman by the name of Colleen Hoover had been writing and self-publishing successful novels until she became the bestselling writer of all time. With 20 published titles, her book sales have exceeded 20 million copies. The phenomenon reached unprecedented proportions last October with the publication of her latest novel, It Starts with Us. When it came out, the book went straight to the top of all the bestseller lists, leaving a trail of previously published titles in its wake.

]]>Jake Dockins (The New York Times / Contacto)<![CDATA[Salman Rushdie: ‘I would rather not have to live under threat, but I would absolutely not change a single thing’]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-02-13/salman-rushdie-i-would-rather-not-have-to-live-under-threat-but-i-would-absolutely-not-change-a-single-thing.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-02-13/salman-rushdie-i-would-rather-not-have-to-live-under-threat-but-i-would-absolutely-not-change-a-single-thing.htmlMon, 13 Feb 2023 18:20:23 +0000Last August 11, moments before Salman Rushdie was about to address an audience of more than a thousand people at the Chautauqua Institute in New York State, a 24-year-old religious fanatic named Hadi Matar rushed up to the stage and stabbed him 15 times. The presenter of the event, Henry Reese, immediately jumped on the attacker, suffering his own wounds while likely saving Rushdie’s life. A state trooper who was present managed to restrain the assailant, handcuffing him, while four doctors who happened to be in the audience were able to stanch the writer’s bleeding until emergency medical services arrived.

]]>JUAN COLOMBATO<![CDATA[Salman Rushdie’s impossible world]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-08-13/salman-rushdies-impossible-world.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-08-13/salman-rushdies-impossible-world.htmlSat, 13 Aug 2022 17:15:42 +0000The best way to measure Salman Rushdie’s worth as a writer is to dive into his extraordinary memoir, Joseph Anton (2012), not because it’s his best work, which it probably is, but to enjoy the depth and quality of his language, his adroit prose, and a mastery of nonfiction that surprises only because he is so well known for his fantastical novels. Joseph Anton explores Rushdie’s life as a public intellectual, and his bold commitment to the political and social issues of the day. But Rushdie’s affinity for fiction still looms over it all. Rushdie used “Joseph Anton” as a pseudonym while in hiding following the fatwa (death sentence) declared by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. He took the first names of two writers he admired and emulated when he first began his literary journey – Joseph Conrad, who told stories about the same world Rushdie would later write about in a postcolonial vein, and Anton Chekhov, master of the transience of short prose. He entrusted the story of his life to these two literary giants, a story marked by the difficult circumstances of a decade in hiding from the fatwa imposed for his purportedly blasphemous book, The Satanic Verses (1988).

]]><![CDATA[Charles Simic, one of the most innovative voices in American poetry, dies at 84]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-01-11/charles-simic-one-of-the-most-innovative-voices-in-american-poetry-dies-at-84.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-01-11/charles-simic-one-of-the-most-innovative-voices-in-american-poetry-dies-at-84.htmlWed, 11 Jan 2023 09:24:07 +0000Charles Simic, one of the most innovative voices in American poetry of the last half century, died on Monday at the age of 84 at an assisted living facility in Dover, New Hampshire. The cause of death was complications from dementia, The New York Times reported.

]]>Pascal Perich<![CDATA[American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s long-awaited return]]>https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-11-05/american-novelist-cormac-mccarthys-long-awaited-return.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-11-05/american-novelist-cormac-mccarthys-long-awaited-return.htmlSat, 05 Nov 2022 03:17:42 +0000Nearly 20 years ago, Cormac McCarthy joined the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical research institute populated by scholars and researchers in fields such as theoretical physics, linguistics, astronomy and mathematics. McCarthy was the only writer in residence. For years, McCarthy could be heard typing away on his blue Olivetti Lettera 32, until one day he decided to put it up for auction at Christie’s. The antiquated typewriter sold for more than $250,000, which McCarthy later donated to the institute. The writer, who has always eschewed hobnobbing with his peers, is happier hanging out with scientists. Instead of novels, his bookshelves are filled with scholarly tomes like The Foundations of Mathematics, published in 1931 by Frank Ramsey, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s protégé.

]]>Gilles Peress (Magnum Photos / Contacto Photo)<![CDATA[Lucy Sante: ‘I tried to be a man, but the truth is that I was never very good at it’]]>https://english.elpais.com/eps/2022-05-03/lucy-sante-i-tried-to-be-a-man-but-the-truth-is-that-i-was-never-very-good-at-it.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/eps/2022-05-03/lucy-sante-i-tried-to-be-a-man-but-the-truth-is-that-i-was-never-very-good-at-it.htmlTue, 03 May 2022 22:03:25 +0000A decade has passed since Lucy Sante last spoke with EL PAÍS. The reason for that occasion was the first Spanish-language translation of her book Kill All Your Darlings, an essay collection about underground American culture. That meeting, as this one, took place at her home in Kingston, the former capital of the State of New York, where Sante had established her permanent residence because she considered that the city where she had spent most of her life, and which she depicted in Low Life (1991), had died. Other essential titles in her bibliography are Evidence (1992), a chilling history of crime in New York between 1914 and 1918, based on photographic evidence taken directly from the city’s police archives, and The Factory of Facts (1998), an autobiographical meditation on the difficulty of setting the limits that define our identity. In 2015, she published The Other Paris, an alternative history of the French capital, which follows the same methodology she used in the book dedicated to New York. Sante taught courses in creative writing and history of photography at the prestigious Bard College for decades. Her chronicles, profiles and essays are on par with Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion.

]]><![CDATA[The danger of speaking Spanish in the United States]]>https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/03/inenglish/1486124276_729304.htmlhttps://english.elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/03/inenglish/1486124276_729304.htmlFri, 03 Feb 2017 12:47:00 +0000Data support faith in the vitality of Spanish in the United States, from its use in homes and communities, to its presence in the media, especially on television. Spanish also has considerable weight in American academia. Despite the fact that US President Donald Trump added an official Twitter account in Spanish, what does the news about the deletion of Spanish from the White House’s website mean?

]]>GLENN KOENIG