Hysterical realism describes fiction marked by manic energy, extravagant plots, encyclopedic knowledge, exaggerated characters, and sustained attention to contemporary social systems. This guide traces the term from James Wood’s criticism of Zadie Smith to works by Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Giannina Braschi. It argues that United States of Banana...
This post show how Sophocles’ Antigone shapes 21st-century literature, theater, visual art, and political theory. It surveys major literary adaptations across genres, including Giannina Braschi’s mixed-genre epic tragedy Putinoika, Anne Carson’s experimental verse play Antigonick, Kamila Shamsie’s political novel Home Fire, Seamus Heaney’s verse drama The Burial at Thebes, and Sophie Deraspe’s...
Spanning nearly two centuries, the Puerto Rican novel is a vibrant tradition shaped across languages, genres, generations, and geographies. From the archipelago to the diaspora—and from Spanish to English and Spanglish—Puerto Rican writers have turned plantations, drawing rooms, barrios, city streets, airplanes, and colonial institutions into settings for resistance, reinvention, and cultural...
Nuyorican women have transformed American poetry, politics, law, public health, journalism, theater, film, television, music and visual art. Rooted in the literary movement shaped by poets such as Julia de Burgos and Giannina Braschi, their influence extends to national leaders Sonia Sotomayor and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; cultural icons Jennifer Lopez, Rita Moreno and Rosie Perez; institution...
Lee cinco poemas de Giannina Braschi en español y mira a la poeta puertorriqueña recitar el divertido y filosófico “Huevos son los meses”. Esta selección de El imperio de los sueños revela una poesía de humor, sensualidad, ritmo e imaginación que transforma la tradición literaria española desde la experiencia puertorriqueña y migratoria en Nueva York, situándose en la vanguardia de la poesía...
This blogpost features a summary of the postcolonial novel United States of Banana excerpted from The Literary Encyclopedia. United States of Banana, Braschi’s first work written in English, rewrites “radical politics as high art” by dramatizing the collapse of the Twin Towers as a metaphor for the fall of the American empire (Gonzalez 23). Described by Library Journal as “bizarre but intriguing”...
The Literary Encyclopedia: Giannina Braschi Biography Giannina Braschi is a leading force of innovation in American and Latin American literature and political philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Braschi writes mixed-genre epic works in Spanish, Spanglish, and English about the marvels and travesties of the human flow—of mass migration, mass incarceration, democracy...
Rethinking the Latin American Canon. Based on an excerpt from The Literary Encyclopedia.... Giannina Braschi functions as a quintessential academic disruptor whose "notoriously unclassifiable" work mandates a rigorous rethinking of contemporary literary boundaries. Rejecting the passivity of conventional storytelling for a "new literary architecture" rooted in geometry and prophetic imagination...
Explore Puerto Rican poetry from the island and its global diaspora, in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Discover influential voices—from Julia de Burgos and Pedro Pietri to Giannina Braschi, Willie Perdomo, and Roque Salas Rivera—along with landmark anthologies, interviews with Puerto Rican women writers, and a Whitney Museum reading that brings generations of Boricua poets together.
Drawing from Carmen Haydée Rivera’s interview collection Diasporic Journeys: Interviews with Puerto Rican Writers in the United States, this post highlights the pivotal role of Nuyorican women playwrights in establishing a distinct, multi-genre theatrical tradition defined by migration, identity, and complex returns "home." It profiles key figures—including Giannina Braschi, Migdalia Cruz, Quiara...