Contributions by Agnieszka Julia Ptak
Agnieszka Julia Ptak studied literature at the graduate level at the University of Buenos Aires. She teaches workshops on Argentine and Latin American literature as well as English and Spanish as Second Languages. From time to time, she publishes and/or translates. Her obsession with reading is longstanding. She always read and still reads (almost) anything that falls into her lap. Among the places she has visited recently are Uhart, Goytisolo, Nielsen, Piñera, Arlt, Neuman, Casas, Kapuściński, as well as others. Another of her obsessions and passions is new languages. Hence she is now studying her forgotten mother tongue, Polish, as well as beginning her study of the cinematographic idiom.
Your Lying Cheater’s Heart
Carmen María Machado
Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her as a Confessional Text
The confessional text—either an author baring his own soul, or a fictional character coming clean about his or her particular version of events—has a long history, from The Confessions of St. Augustine to Nabokov’s Lolita. In the spirit of this genre comes Junot Díaz’s second short story collection, This is How You Lose Her, a sequence of bright, tight stories revolving around love’s many complications—infidelity, pregnancy, dissolving marriages, wounded families, the fact that true love is rare and can be lost forever. The sun in this particular universe is Yunior (of Díaz’s previous collection, Drown), a geeky jackass whose two most consistent qualities are cheating on his girlfriends and an unflappable optimism that he can get away with anything. The first story … Read More »
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