Octavio Paz

Barney Rosset, the renegade founder of Grove Press who fought groundbreaking legal battles against censorship and introduced American readers to such provocative writers as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, died Tuesday in...

Mañana Forever Mexico and the Mexicans Jorge G. Castañeda Alfred A. Knopf: 294 pp., $27.95 Mexicans, like their Spanish forebears, love to quote proverbs as a way of underscoring eternal truths and imparting folk wisdom to younger generations....

The Latino Theater Company’s contribution to Radar L.A. is “Solitude,” by Evelina Fernández, a stylishly directed, charmingly acted but melodramatic and drawn-out portrait of Gabriel (Geoffrey Rivas), who reunites with his former best...

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry An Anthology Edited by Ilan Stavans Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 729 pp., $50 Here's the answer to a hypothetical "Jeopardy" query: "Who are Pablo Neruda and, um…?" And now, the question:...

Critics interviewed by Milenio disagreed with the use of the artists' images for differing reasons. Historian Alejandro Rosas Robles said the Nobel Prize-winning writer Octavio Paz is a more worthy of appearing on the note because his work speaks more...

The writer Mario Vargas Llosa, a leading figure of the so-called "Boom" in Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s and an outsize political figure in his native Peru, has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy, announcing...

Now that Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature, an award seen as a victory for Spanish-language and Latin American letters, comes the backlash over the Peruvian author's politics. Vargas Llosa, 74, known for his novels such as "The...

Mark Swed reviews two memorials to opera composer Daniel Catán....

The selection Thursday morning of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa as winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature raises a familiar question: Why him? Why now? On the one hand, Vargas Llosa is without question a writer of stature, a central figure...

Daniel Catán, an opera composer and librettist whose works including "Il Postino" and "Florencia en el Amazonas" have been praised for their lyrical romanticism and humane generosity of spirit, died suddenly Saturday in Austin, Texas. He was 62. Catán'...

My Mexican grandfather used to say that salads were for rabbits. My Mexican father thinks a good steak cures any stomach ailment. And a Mexican friend used to joke that a pet pig that lived near my old Westside neighborhood would last approximately two...

When the Nobel Prize in literature was announced this month, the name "Herta Muller" met much American head-scratching. Muller, an ethnically German Romanian who writes of trials of living under a repressive dictatorship, has a strong reputation in Europe...