Ignacio Sanchez Prado

My Mexico City welcome meal, at Los Condes, the kind of tradition Mexico City taqueria that also has a fresh fruit stand. the vudú: agujas norteñas (similar to kalbi) with nopales and potatoes, quesadilla de huitlacoche, and licuado de mamey

I may even be interested in thinking a panel somewhere on cultural industries because I’m doing something similar with streaming platforms. I’m moving institutions this summer, but let’s talk in the fall!

Nora, that sounds really great! Looking forward to reading it already!

No, the saying is from a song they did with Dr Shenka

Desde Iztapalapa para St Louis, Los Angeles Azules! With a surprise song with Ximena Sariñana! Very happy for my Chilango heart!

Is fire will come not in MUBI? It’s there here in the US

No, not opening here till March. I have not seen Magellan either because it screened here while I was out of town

I finally saw the best picture nominees and this is my personal ranking:

The actually great:

Sentimental Value
The Secret Agent
Sinners

The good but not their director’s best:

One Battle After Another
Bugonia
Frankenstein
Hamnet

The trash

Marty Supreme
Train Dreams
F1

Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams morphs Dennis Johnson’s novelization of the fragments of memory and experience through history into an Americana-tinged allegory with whiffs of early Malick, overemphasizing fatherhood and national at the expense of the feverish and the violent. In Netflix.

Dying

Read over the past couple of days, a collection of short stories translated from Urdu, capturing India’s partition with fierceness and pain, from an author whose life was in many ways affected by it. Highly recommended, another great Archipelago book

Escarpit was widely read in Spanish at the time. There is also in the 1950s a sociology of the Argentine literary public by Adolfo Prieto.

Yes, it stems from European universities, where literary studies PhDs have robust publication studies concentrations that lead to editorial careers and in the US a few of us worked on it through either Bourdieusian approaches or world literature debates

There are a few dedicated scholars who write in Spanish and are unavailable in English: Marco Brosshard works on festivals, Ana Gallego did a great doc on women editors and has many writing, Gustavo Guerrero (who is himself the Latin American editor at Gallimard) has a number of work, etc.

Ascent to Glory | Columbia University Press Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed destined for obscurity upon its publication in 1967. The little-known author, small p... | CUP

There is this excellent book about how Cien años became a bestseller: cup.columbia.edu/book/ascent-...

World Editors The existence of World Literature depends on specific processes, institutions, and actors involved in the global circulation of literary works. The contributions of this volume aim to pay attention to...

So does this book: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

This book is a good place to start because it gathers many of the people doing the work in both Spanish and English: brill.com/display/titl...

I love that this work is being done in these books and just here to tout that the Latin American literary studies field has done similar work for many years, and I hope the literary sociology fields across languages get to be seen in their collective endeavor.

The four excellent classical albums that accompanied my weekend writing and editing

A lovely book by one of the foremost poets of Brazil’s counterculture, a counterpoint to concretism from Tropicalia, author of poems filled with joy and playfulness. Salomāo also co-wrote one of my favorite songs, Vapor barato, and as viceminister of culture he sought to make the book a basic right

3 AM with the radio lectures on Blaise Pascal by French critic Antoine Compagnon, someone who calls himself “a child of the democratization of culture.” Intended as radio shows, it builds on Pascal’s dialectic with Montaigne to bring the epicurean spirit of the essayist back into the order of faith

Aidan Zamiri’s The Moment, an uneven but fun metamockumentary, depicting talented people swallowed alive by vampiric capitalism and the untalented leeches that control infrastructures of artistic work, plus an Alexander Skarsgard performance for the ages. In theaters.

I immediately thought of you. Did you publish about it?

Overnight treat, a creative memoir essay of avant-garde spirit, exploring race, aesthetics and the evolving relationship of a literary classic from the child’s encounter with a pedagogical figure to the poet reader dealing with his legacy. Superbly translated by the prolific Selma Ancira.

David Borenstein and Pasha Talankin’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a bravely filmed documentary by a teacher who shows the authoritarian takeover of curriculum and the militarization of the school, with events that will sound familiar to teachers in the US. In Kino Film Collection.

New translation of Thomas Bernhard’s early short stories. You can see his evolution from a late Finis Austriae style mediated by Dostoyevsky to the intense, compulsive voice of his transformative literary prosody. A good introduction to his work before delving into the heart of his darkness.

Good read early today, interestingly another book about the border between civilization and nature, this one in the Colombian tradition of La vorágine. Fantastic prose, good thrilling intensity.

The first truly great Mexican music album of 2026 is out, from the alt-rock band Hello Seahorse! Truly at the top of their powers, perhaps their best work so far.