I’m taking on a new role as assistant editor of The International Literary Quarterly, starting with Issue 3 that is scheduled for release around the mid of May.

Under the guidance of founding editor Peter Robertson (a fellow resident of Buenos Aires), issue 3 of the literary review is shaping up with a list of outstanding writers. Here’s a preview of writers appearing in the upcoming issue:

Marjorie Agosin (a writer that I’ve mentioned before on this blog concerning her 1993 essay How to Speak with the Dead? A Poet’s Notebook)
Christopher Arkell
Michael Blumenthal
Jill Dawson
Denise Duhamel
Zulfikar Ghose
Roberta Gordenstein
Geoffrey Hartman
Irina Ratushinskaya
Anthony Rudolf

Issue 3 also will feature work by guest artist Lydia Rubio from Cuba.

Chad W. Post of the Three Percent blog, an excellent source of information on literature in translation, is in Buenos Aires for the annual book fair and a meeting of foreign editors.

Our schedule is packed—starting tomorrow morning at 9:30, we have meetings from 10am till 7pm (or later) every day of the week. And no scheduled tango dancing—all literary meetings.

You can follow his updates.

Who are the legendary figures of Buenos Aires? Obviously, Eva Peron is the most known (along with hubby Juan). Among those who read, Borges is legendary. Among those who dance tango, there’s Gardel.

Buenos Aires has great old architecture but are any of the architects of Buenos Aires really legendary, the likes of Louis Sullivan or Gaudí?

Actually, this really isn’t about Buenos Aires. The main reason behind this post is to provide an opportunity to quote a passage from a novel by James Salter that I’m reading. Light Years (recently reissued by Penguin and with an introduction by Richard Ford) is about the marriage of Viri and Nedra. Viri is a New York architect:

He could not be Sullivan, he could not be Gaudí. Well, perhaps Gaudí, who lived to that old age which is sainthood, an ascetic old age, frail, slight, wandering the streets of Barcelona, unknown to its many inhabitants. In the end he was struck by a streetcar and left unattended. In the bareness and odor of the charity ward amid the children and poor relations a single eccentric life was ending, a life that was more clamorous than the sea, an everlasting life, a life which was easy to abandon since it was only a husk; it had already metamorphosed, escaped into buildings, cathedrals, legend.