Efectos personales / De eso se trata

Juan Villoro is recognized as one of the great current Latin American writers. Journalist, novelist, short story writer, essayist and chronicler, he collected for the first time his literary essays in Personal Effects (Mazatlán Prize 2001), which was followed by That's What It's About (2004), titles that we bring together today in this volume. As he also did in the later The Utility of Desire (2017), Villoro here converts his readings into stories of intelligence. Both works show a narrator immersed in the adventure of reading. The anecdotes follow one another as in a novel and the comments arise with the wit of a happy gathering. An exceptional gallery of characters pass through these pages: Goethe trapped in the geometry of love, Cervantes, founder of the road novel, Rousseau, who unites his destiny to the risky notion of author, and Lowry in the intoxicated paradise of Cuernavaca. We also find testimony of elective affinities: a reconstruction of Burroughs' turbulent stay in Mexico, the investigation of Bernhard's posthumous exile, the illustrated garden of Monterroso, the most heterodox side of Fuentes, Pitol's customs-free journey, and Rossi's distracted intelligence. Along with these – and others – tributes and portraits, there is space for the chronicler Villoro and for the one who explores the rites of passage of literary translation and the dialogue between the literatures of America and Europe.