Contributions by Hugh Ferrer
Hugh Ferrer is the Associate Director of the International Writing Program, a senior editor at the Iowa Review, a lecturer at the University of Iowa, and a faculty member of the Iowa Summer Writing Program. His first exposure to Latin American literature was his father’s full shelf of 1970’s Avon Bard paperback editions of Gabriel García Márquez. Later, after college, reading broadly in world literature led to an immersion in Borges and Machado de Assis, among many others. And now, at the International Writing Program, he has the regular opportunity to meet and work with dozens of leading Latin and Central American writers, including many from Buenos Aires and Argentina, such as Martin Rejtman, Guillermo Martinez, Leopoldo Brizuela, Carlos Gamerro, Román Antopolsky, Pola Oloixarac, Maria Cristoff, and Federico Falco. Two Central American authors whose work in translation he’s enjoyed in the last year are Horacio Castellanos Moya, from El Salvador, and the Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon.
Prairie Lights [iowa city]
![Prairie Lights [iowa city]](http://www.buenosairesreview.org/wp-content/uploads/jlc-Prairie-Lights-Facebook-Photo.jpg)
Hugh Ferrer
For as little as $140, anyone now can now buy his or her own little bookstore—for that is essentially what an e-book reader is: a combination of book and private store, a boutique, almost, with minimal overhead and a vast selection, a distant warehouse’s franchise outlet, scaled for the hand, serviced by a single employee, who is also the owner and the store’s sole customer. And, contrary to inherited wisdom, the success of these handheld machines suggests that there are actually armies of people who have wanted to work in a bookstore, but had never before had the chance.
In the meantime, beautiful independent bookstores like Prairie Lights (est. 1978) have become multi-layered symbols: as bookstores, they resist the unwanted apotheosis of “book culture” into the cloud; as “independents,” they are the victims of the latest corporate assault … Read More »
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