Read about famous Puerto Rican writers of the Diaspora and emerging voices alike in this book review by Carmen Dolores Hernandez in Nuevo Dia. “Diasporic Journeys”: The Book that Explores Puerto Rican Literature Beyond the Island. The publication gathers interviews with Boricua writers based in the United States, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Giannina Braschi, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. This blog...
The Literary Encyclopedia summaries Empire of Dreams, an epic poem by Giannina Braschi. El imperio de los sueños (1988) [Empire of Dreams, 1994) is a collection of six books of poetry and fiction written in Spanish during the 1980s in New York City. The work is organized in three parts: Asalto al tiempo [Assault on Time] (1981), La comedia profana [Profane Comedy] (1985), and Diario íntimo de la...
Why does Euripides’ Bacchae keep returning to the modern stage? Twenty-first-century playwrights, poets, and directors have reinvented the ancient tragedy through rap, queer performance, feminist choruses, ritual theater, music, dance, political satire, and multimedia spectacle. From Anne Carson and major productions in London, Athens, Sicily, and beyond to Giannina Braschi’s PUTINOIKA...
Università degli Studi di Padova: Domani a Padova ospitiamo una grande autrice portoricana, Giannina Braschi. È una presenza pazzesca, oltre che un'autrice sfidante, che dilaga. Putinoika features a contemporary Antigone Per Campanotto è uscito poco tempo fa il suo Putinoika, assurdo, sublime, tragicomico, un oggetto letterario multigenere incollocabile e, finalmente, un po' di frescura. Qui...
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”...