REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA

21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

CONTENT
Literary genres, traditions and forms from different national literature and cultures, namely, Asian, Anglo-
American, European, Latin American, and African

CONTENT STANDARD
The learner will be able to understand and appreciate literary texts in various genres across national literature
and cultures.

PERFORMANCE STANDARD
The learner will be able todemonstrate understanding and appreciation of 21st century literature of the world
through:
1. a written close analysis and critical interpretation of a literary text in terms of form and theme, with a
description of its context derived from research;

LEARNING COMPETENCIES
Writing a close analysis and critical interpretation of literary texts, applying a reading approach, and doing an
adaptation of these, require from the learner the ability to:
1. identify representative texts and authors from Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa

21st Century Literature – all literary works written and published at the latter part of the 21 st century (from
2001 onwards). These works are often characterized as gender sensitive, technologically alluding, culturally
pluralistic, operates on the extreme reality or extreme fiction, and questions conventions and supposedly
absolute norms.

21st CENTURY ASIAN LITERATURE

1. Scheherazade (short story) by Haruki Murakami (Japan)
2. Their Last Visitor (sudden fiction) by Kim Young Ha (South Korea) translated by Dafna Zur
3. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (short story) by Etgar Keret (Israel)
4. Elegy by Mong-Lan (Vietnam)
5. The Burning Kite by Ouyang Jianghe (China) translated b Austin Woerner
6. The Wheel by Vinda Karandikar (India)
7. Song by Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Syria) translated by Khaled Mattawa

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS FROM ASIA

HARUKI MURAKAMI (January 12, 1949)

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as
internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native
country. His work has received numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor
International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize.

YOUNG-HA KIM (November 11, 1968)

Young-ha Kim was born in Hwacheon. He moved from place to place as a child, since his father was in the
military. As a child, he suffered from gas poisoning from coal gas and lost memory before ten. He was
educated at Yonsei University in Seoul, majoring business administration, but he didn't show much interest in
it. Instead he focused on writing stories. Kim, after graduating from Yonsei University in 1993, began his
military service as an assistant detective at the military police 51st Infantry Division near Suwon. His career as
a professional writer started in 1995 right after discharge.

ETGAR KERET (August 20, 1967)

Keret's first published work was Pipelines (‫צינורות‬, Tzinorot, 1992), a collection of short stories which was
largely ignored when it came out. His second book, Missing Kissinger (‫געגועיי לקיסינג'ר‬, Ga'agu'ai le-Kissinger,
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21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

1994), a collection of fifty very short stories, caught the attention of the general public. The short story "Siren",
which deals with the paradoxes of modern Israeli society, is included in the curriculum for the Israeli
matriculation exam in literature.

MỘNG-LAN (March 25, 1970)

Mộng-Lan is a Vietnamese-born American award-winning poet, writer, painter, photographer, musician,
composer, singer, Argentine tango dancer, choreographer, and educator. Former Stegner Fellow at Stanford
University, Fulbright Scholar, she has published seven books of poetry & artwork, three chapbooks, has won
numerous prizes such as the Juniper Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Poems have been included in international
and national anthologies such as Best American Poetry Anthology and several Norton anthologies.

OUYANG JIANGHE (1956)

Ouyang Jianghe was born in Luzhou, Sichuan Province. He is a renowned Chinese poet, critic of poetry and
culture and calligrapher and is Director of the publication Today and a professor at Beijing Normal University.
Among his works published in the People’s Republic of China are 10 books of poetry - including Who Leaves
and Who Stays, Such a learned hunger and Da shi da fei - and his collection of reviews and essays Standing
on This Side of Fabrication.

GOVIND VINAYAK KARANDIKAR (August 23, 1918 – March 14, 2010)

Govind Vināyak Karandikar better known as Vindā Karandikar, was a well-known Marathi writer. In 2003, he
was presented with the Jnanpith Award, which is India's one of the most prestigious literary awards. He has
also received for his literary work some other awards, including Keshavasut Prize, Soviet Land Nehru Literary
Award, Kabir Samman, and India's highest literary award, for lifetime achievement, the Sahitya Akademi
Fellowship in 1996.

ALI AHMAD SAID ESBER (January 1, 1930)

Ali Ahmad Said Esber , also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis, is a Syrian poet, essayist and
translator who is considered one of the most influential and dominant Arab poets of the modern era. He led a
modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, "exerting a seismic influence" on Arabic poetry
comparable to T.S. Eliot's in the anglophone world.

REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS FROM ASIA

SCHEHERAZADE
(Short Story) by Haruki Murakami (Japan)

Murakami has a new short story in the recent New Yorker (Oct. 13, 2014), the title of which, "Scheherazade,"
immediately attracted my attention, having recently read the new translation of 1001 Nights by Hanan Al-
Shakyh and Marina Warner's wonderful study, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights.

Murakami's story is about a guy who cannot, for some undisclosed reason, leave his house. A nameless
woman is assigned (but we do not know by whom) to come to his house regularly to bring him food and
supplies. She also has sex with him and tells him stories; thus, he calls her Scheherazade. The main story she
tells him in the story we are reading is about her breaking into the home of a boy with whom she was obsessed
while in high school, (she is middle-aged now), fantasizing about him, stealing trivial items, and leaving other
items in their place.

THEIR LAST VISITOR

(sudden fiction) by Kim Young Ha (South Korea) translated by Dafna Zur

Yŏngsŏn was twenty-four. She had majored in sculpture at a prestigious art school, then married Chŏngsu, a
graduate of the same school, before the ink was dry on her diploma. It happened so quickly that most of their
friends thought the wedding invitations were a practical joke. She was already working as a graphic designer at

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an Internet firm, and a friend had gotten Chŏngsu a job as a set designer for a movie producer. Yŏngsŏn's
small-scale start-up company kept her busy, but Chŏngsu was even busier. He usually worked through the
night. Movies were always produced on a tight schedule. Chŏngsu basically lived with his tool belt on. He'd
pound away for days constructing an elaborate set only to bash it to pieces within hours. That was life: good
work went completely unnoticed while carelessness was criticized ruthlessly. He had to put up with a lot of
crap. Yŏngsŏn tended to think her husband's talents were going to waste, but she kept her opinion to herself.

ELEGY
Mong-Lan (Vietnam)

& what if hope crashes through the door what if

that lasts a somersault?
hope for serendipity
even if a series of meals were all between us
even if the aeons lined up out
of order
what are years if not measured by trees

THE WHEEL
Vinda Karandikar (India)

Someone is about to come but doesn't. Is about

to turn on the stairs but doesn't.
I button my shirt
come from the laundry with all its dazzling blots,
like one's peculiar fate.
I shut the door, sit quietly.
The fan begins to whirl
and turn the air into a whirlpool of fire,
making a noise bigger than the house.
Someone is about to come and doesn't.
It doesn't matter.
Calmly I lean against the wall,
become a wall.

SONG
by Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Syria) translated by Khaled Mattawa

Bells on our eyelashes

and the death throes of words,
and I among fields of speech,
a knight on a horse made of dirt.
My lungs are my poetry, my eyes a book,
and I, under the skin of words,
on the beaming banks of foam,
a poet who sang and died
leaving this singed elegy
before the faces of poets,
for birds at the edge of sky.

21st CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE

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1. A History of Everything, Including You (sudden fiction) by Jenny Hollowell (United States)
2. Chickens (microfiction) by Elaine Margarell (United States)
3. A Gentleman's C (microfiction) by Padgett Powell (United States)
4. One Today (poem) by Richard Blanco (United States)
5. We Ate the Children Last (science fiction) by Yann Martel (Canada)
6. The Right Sort (twitter story) by David Stephen Mitchell (United Kingdom)
7. One Night (elegy) by Ann Gray (United Kingdom)

ANGLO-AMERICA
Anglo-America (also referred to as Anglo-Saxon America) most often designates to a region in the Americas in
which English is a main language and British culture and the British Empire have had significant historical,
ethnic, linguistic and cultural impact. Anglo-America is distinct from Latin America, a region of the Americas
where Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese and French) are prevalent. The term Anglo-America
frequently refers specifically to the United States and Canada, by far the two most populous English-speaking
countries in North America.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS FROM ANGLO-AMERICA

JENNY HOLLOWELL
Jenny Hollowell is an American novelist and short fiction writer, and a partner and executive producer of music
house and record label Ring The Alarm. Her debut novel Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe was published in
2010, leading her to be named one of the "best new writers" by The Daily Beast. Hollowell received a BFA
from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she studied film and photography, and an MFA in Creative
Writing from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction and recipient of the
Balch Short Story Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Scheherezade, and the anthology
New Sudden Fiction, and was named a distinguished story by The Best American Short Stories.
BFA – BRITISH FLORIST ASSOCIATION
MFA – MEDIA FEDERATION OF AUSTRALIA

PADGETT POWELL (April 25, 1952)

Padgett Powell is an American novelist in the Southern literary tradition. His debut novel, Edisto (1984), was
nominated for the American Book Award and was excerpted in The New Yorker. Powell has written five more
novels including A Woman Named Drown (1987), Edisto Revisited (1996), a sequel to his debut, Mrs.
Hollingsworth's Men (2000), The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? (2009), and You & Me (2012), his most recent
and three collections of short stories. In addition to The New Yorker, Powell's work has appeared in The Paris
Review, Harper's, Grand Street, Oxford American, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications.

RICHARD BLANCO (February 15, 1968)

Richard Blanco was born in Madrid and immigrated to the United States as an infant with his Cuban-exile
family. He was raised in Miami and earned a BS in civil engineering and MFA in creative writing from Florida
International University. Blanco has been a practicing engineer, writer, and poet since 1991. His collections of
poetry include City of a Hundred Fires (1998), which won the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize; Directions to the
Beach of the Dead (2005), winner of the PEN/American Beyond Margins Award; Looking for the Gulf Motel
(2012), winner of the Thom Gunn Award, the Maine Literary Award, and the Paterson Prize; One Today
(2013); Boston Strong (2013); and How to Love a Country (forthcoming 2019).

YANN MARTEL (June 25, 1963)

Yann Martel is a Spanish-born Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi ,
a number 1 international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million
copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the Bestseller Lists of the New York Times and The Globe
and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. It was adapted to the screen and directed by Ang Lee, garnering
four Oscars (the most for the event) including Best Director and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original
Score.

DAVID STEPHEN MITCHELL (January 12, 1969)

An English author, he is known for such bestselling novels as number9dream and Cloud Atlas. The latter work
was made into a major motion picture. After completing his education, he taught English in Japan for eight

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years and used his savings to finance his early writing career. Both his early novel, Ghostwritten, and his later
work, Cloud Atlas, consist of separate but interrelated stories.

ANN GRAY (May 4, 1946)

The author of a number of collections including Painting Skin (Fatchance Press, 1995) and The Man I Was
Promised (Headland, 2004), Ann was commended for the National Poetry Competition 2010 and won the
Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2014. Her studies for an MA in Creative writing from the University of Plymouth led
to her collection of poems about the sudden loss of her partner, At The Gate (Headland, 2008). ‘My Blue Hen’
is one of many written since that publication, which, she says, “prove” she was not finished with those poems.

REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS ANGLO-AMERICA

A HISTORY OF EVERYTHING, INCLUDING YOU

(sudden fiction) by Jenny Hollowell (United States)

A History of Everything, Including You.” by Jenny Hollowell was overall very descriptive, so descriptive one
could imagine everything that she was speaking of. She started this story as a very broad and simple
statement of how Earth started and or created. As the story starts to blossom one can tell that this story
became more personal than the Earth being created. Jenny starts to open up and goes on explaining what
seems to be the most important events of her life in a metaphorical way. Through descriptive sentences one
can feel the emotional connection she was having toward this writing. Also since Jenny is telling this story in
first person everything seems very personal at this point. Overall I loved this story and how open she seems to
be with her life events, from the beginning of time to the end of her life.

CHICKENS
(microfiction) by Elaine Margarell (United States)

Elaine Magarrell's "Chickens" relies upon the apparently ridiculous in order to raise very serious questions.
Both amusing and troubling by turns, the story introduces such devices as a "chicken angel" to interrogate the
value of religious faith and to raise ethical concerns about eating meat. It exploits the fine line between
probable opposites - such as laughter and sadness, absurdity and profundity - to ask us to rethink the
relationship between dinner and morality.

A GENTLEMAN’S C
(microfiction) by Padgett Powell (United States)

My father, trying to finally graduate from college at sixty-two, came, by curious circumstance, to be enrolled in
an English class I taught, and I was, perhaps, a bit tougher on him than I was on the others. Hadn’t he been
tougher on me than on other people’s kids growing up? I gave him a hard, honest, low C. About what I felt he’d
always given me.

We had a death in the family, and my mother and I traveled to the funeral. My father stayed put to complete his
exams–it was his final term. On the way home we learned that he had received his grades, which were low
enough in the aggregate to prevent him from graduating, and reading this news on the dowdy sofa inside the
front door, he leaned over as if to rest and had a heart attack and died. For years I had thought that the old
man’s passing away would not affect me, but it did.

ONE TODAY
(poem) by Richard Blanco (United States)

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,

peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,

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each one yawning to life, rescendoing into our day:

pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise.

WE ATE THE CHILDREN LAST

(science fiction) by Yann Martel (Canada)
A man dying from intestinal cancer volunteers for an experimental treatment which involves receiving the
transplanted digestive system of a pig. The transplant is successful, but leaves him with a pig-like penchant for
consuming garbage. Considering this an acceptable trade-off for a medical breakthrough, society initially
accepts the widespread adoption of the technique, but eventually collapses as the transplant recipients'
insatiable appetites evolve into cannibalism.

THE RIGHT SORT

(twitter story) by David Stephen Mitchell (United Kingdom)
The short story The Right Sort, written by David Stephen Mitchell - author of the famous novel Cloud Atlas -
was posted to Twitter in a course of seven days. The story, which consists of over 280 Tweets, generated
some excitement when it first started out. However, later Tweets received fewer and fewer Retweets and
Likes. The idea for the project had come from Mitchell's publisher and served as means to generate
excitement about Mitchell's forthcoming novel The Bone Clocks. Nevertheless, Mitchell turned the short story
into a novel of its own called Slade House, a year after publishing it on Twitter.

ONE NIGHT
(elegy) by Ann Gray (United Kingdom)
One night you’ll come back and I’ll wake
to see you moving noiselessly in your socks,
you’ll look bewildered, nothing’s quite the same.
You’ll be hunting through the drawers,
wondering where your clothes are.
I won’t move or speak, I’ll try not to breathe…

Carol Ann says: This comes from the Cornwall-based poet Ann Gray’s new collection At The Gate (Headland,
2008) a powerfully moving sequence of elegies to her partner, who was killed in a car accident. In this poem,
the grief of bereavement re-imagines the lover as a Lazarus figure, returning from the dead, puzzled and
disconcerted at the small changes in the bedroom and the changing, ongoing lives of the living. The closing
question is unbearably poignant, holding a deeper, tragic meaning beneath its colloquial surface.

21st CENTURY CONTINENTAL EUROPEAN LITERATURE

1. Hazaran (short story) by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (France), translated by Patricia E. Frederick
2. Kiss (blog fiction) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Spain)
3. The Red Fox Fur Coat (sudden fiction) by Teolinda Gersao (Portugal)
4. Blood of a Mole (sudden fiction) by Zdravka Evtimova (Bulgaria)
5. Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet (poem) by Eavan Boland (Ireland)
6. from "Late" (poem) by Gottfried Benn (Germany)

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS FROM CONTINENTAL EUROPE

JEAN-MARIE GUSTAVE LE CLEZIO (April 13, 1940)

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, usually identified as J. M. G. Le Clézio, is a French writer and professor. The
author of over 40 works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Procès-Verbal and the 2008
Nobel Prize in Literature for his life's work, as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual
ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN (September 25, 1964)

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Ruiz Zafón was born in the City of Barcelona. Growing up in Spain, he began his working life by making money
in advertising. His grandparents had worked in a factory and his father sold insurance. In the 1990s Ruiz Zafón
moved to Los Angeles where he worked briefly in screen writing. He is fluent in English. Ruiz Zafón's first
novel, El Príncipe de la Niebla (The Prince of Mist, 1993), earned the Edebé literary prize fosr young adult
fiction. He is also the author of three additional young adult novels, El palacio de la medianoche (1994), Las
luces de septiembre (1995) and Marina (1999). The English version of El Príncipe de la Niebla was published
in 2010.

TEOLINDA GERSAO (January 30, 1940)

Teolinda Gersão is a Portuguese writer. Born in Coimbra, she studied at the Universities of Coimbra, Tübingen
and Berlin. She also taught at the Technical University of Berlin, Lisbon University, and the Universidade Nova
de Lisboa, among others. A full-time writer since the mid-1990s, Gersao is the author of more than a dozen
books. She has won several literary prizes for her work. Her novel The Word Tree set in colonial Mozambique,
was translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa.

ZDRAVKA EVTIMOVA (July 24,1959)

Zdravka Evtimova (born in Pernik, Bulgaria) is a contemporary Bulgarian writer. She has four short story
collections and four novels published in Bulgarian. Her short stories have appeared in many international
literary journals. Some of her short story collections were translated into other languages. As well as being an
author, Zdravka works as a literary translator from English, French and German. Zdravka Evtimova has
translated more than 25 novels by English, American and Canadian authors into Bulgarian language. She
translates the work of Bulgarian writers into English and is a member of the Bulgarian Writers' Union and the
Writers' League in UK, Yorkshire-Humbers

EAVAN BOLAND (September 24, 1944)

Eavan Boland is an Irish poet, author, and professor. She is currently a professor at Stanford University, where
she has taught since 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish
history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving
Certificate. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Eavan Boland's first book of poetry was
New Territory published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This was followed by The War Horse
(1975), In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the
ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.

GOTTFRIED BENN (May 2, 1886 – July 7, 1956)

Gottfried Benn was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in
Literature five times. He began his literary career as a poet when he published a booklet titled Morgue and
other Poems in 1912, containing expressionist poems dealing with physical decay of flesh, with blood, cancer,
and death. Benn's poetry projects an introverted nihilism, that is, an existentialist outlook that views artistic
expression as the only purposeful action. In his early poems Benn used his medical experience, often using
medical terminology, to portray humanity morbidly as just another species of disease-ridden animal.

REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS FROM CONTINENTAL EUROPE

HAZARAN
(short story) by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (France),
translated by Patricia E. Frederick

In the story "Hazaran" draws upon the genre of the fairy tale are the motifs of the quest; the obstacle; the test,
the supernatural assistance offered the hero or heroine; and the transformation of the hero or heroine who
passes from a state of deprivation to a state.
In "Hazaran" these traditional element to structure a parable of modern life. Modern fairy tale is given a realistic
setting. Resident of a shanty town of immigrants on the outskirts of a modern city, the heroine alia is a victim of
capitalist exploitation. Her encounter with Martin the supernatural agent will transform her life by showing her
the path to spiritual happiness. At the same time, Martin will transform the life if the entire community.
The name "Hazaran" has at least three meaning in his story;It refers to the story we are reading; it is the name
of the fairy tale that Martin tells the children; it is the name of fabulous country of the birds in that story

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KISS
(blog fiction) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Spain)

“I never told anybody, but getting that apartment was nothing short of a miracle. All I knew about Laura
was that she worked part-time at the offices of the landlord on the first floor, and that she kissed like a tango. I
met her on a July night when the skies blanketing Barcelona sizzled with steam and desperation. I had been
sleeping on a bench in a nearby square when I was awakened by the brush of her lips…”

THE RED FOX FUR COAT

(sudden fiction) by Teolinda Gersao (Portugal)

“The Red Fox Fur Coat” by Teolinda Gersão starts off with a bank clerk (I’m gonna call her Sheila for the rest
of this presentation because I like that more than “the bank clerk”) making her way home one day after work.
She walks by a furrier’s shop and is immediately entranced with a red fox fur coat. But the shop is closed, so
she eagerly waits until the next morning to try it on. The saleswoman remarks that the coat could have been
made for Sheila. Unfortunately, the price is five times what she can afford, but the saleswoman says that she
can spread out the payments. She quickly decides to work over the holidays so she can buy the coat.

BLOOD OF A MOLE
(sudden fiction) by Zdravka Evtimova (Bulgaria)

It’s about a nameless character who runs a pet shop. Barely anyone ever came in and bought anything, until a
strange lady, featuring mole-like tenancies, comes in asking for the blood of a mole. She claimed 3 drops of it
would cure her son’s illness. The pet shop owner didn’t have moles, but felt awful, so he/she (never specified)
slipped into the back room and slit his/her wrist. The old lady came back days later saying her son could walk
again.

Fast forward to a few days later and a man comes in claiming that he needs three drops of mole’s blood so
that he could save his dying wife. He took blood from the pet shop owner’s wrist as well and left. Finally, the
next day, a mob of people waited by the pet shop, all wanting mole’s blood, all clutching little glass bottles, and
knives.

ATLANTIS - A LOST SONNET

(poem) by Eavan Boland (Ireland)

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder

that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it

Paraphrase: The author begins by wondering how an entire city could have suddenly disappeared
underwater. Then he relates this to his old city, and describes some of the features he remembers most.
Lastly, he gives a possible explanation for how the city disappeared: it was just a story made up to help others
emphasize the sorrows of losing something forever.
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Connotation: This poem has an extended metaphor that compares the lost city of Atlantis to the sorrows of
people. I think the author is trying to portray how it’s sad to come to the realization that memoires in the past
are gone forever.

21st CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE

1. Like Hercules (microstory) by Ana Maria Shua (Argentina) translated by Steven J. Stewart
2. Honey (flash fiction) by Antonio Utgar (Columbia) translated by Katherine Silver
3. Essential Things (sudden fiction) by Jorge Luis Arzola (Cuba)
4. You Didn't Know (poem) by Idea Vilarino (Uruguay) translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval
5. The Desert of Atacama V (poem) by Raul Zurita (Chile) translated by Anna Deeny
6. To Those Who Have Lost Everything (poem) by Francisco X. Alarcon (Mexico)

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS FROM LATIN AMERICA

ANA MARIA SHUA (April 22, 1951)

Ana María Shua (born in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine writer who has published over eighty books in
numerous genres including: novels, short stories, micro fiction, poetry, drama, children's literature, books of
humor and Jewish folklore, anthologies, film scripts, journalistic articles, and essays. Her writing has been
translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish,
Korean, Japanese, Bulgarian, and Serbian. Her stories appear in anthologies throughout the world. She has
received numerous national and international awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is one of
Argentina’s premier living writers. She is particularly known in the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the
Atlantic as “the Queen of the Microstory.

ANTONIO UTGAR (1974)

Antonio Ungar (born in Bogotá, Colombia) a globetrotter, he has lived in Mexico, Spain, and the United
Kingdom, and is currently based in Palestine-Israel. He devotes part of his time to writing non-fiction about his
home country, Colombia, as well as the Middle East, and was granted the Colombian National Journalism
Award in 2005. He has published two short story collections, Trece circos comunes (Thirteen Ordinary
Circuses, 1999) and De ciertos animals tristes (Of Certain Sad Animals, 2000), as well as other stories which
have appeared in international literary magazines and more than twenty-five anthologies. Ungar has also tried
his hand at longer narrative forms: his novel Zanahorias voladoras (Flying Carrots) was published in 2004,
followed by Tres ataúdes blancos (Three White Coffins), which won the Herralde Prize in 2010 and was
shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos Award in 2011.

JORGE LUIS ARZOLA (1966)

Jorge Luis Arzola was born in Jatibonico, Cuba. Unlike those authors who have up to now shaped the image of
Cuban literature, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Miguel Barnet, Jesús Díaz and Reinaldo Arenas, Arzola belongs
to a new generation of writers, the so-called “novísimos“. This generation is on the one hand influenced more
than the preceeding one by the new awareness of national identity which has resulted following the Cuban
revolution, and on the other hand, following the political and economic crisis facing the country after the fall of
the Iron Curtain, it questions these ideals.

RAÚL ZURITA (January 10, 1950)

Raúl Zurita Canessa is a Chilean poet. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000. Zurita spent
four years earning his living as a computer salesman during a period of financial hardship. At the same time he
was a guest reader at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, where he met writers
and intellectuals such as Nicanor Parra, Ronald Kay, Christian Hunneus and Enrique Lihn. The first of his
poems to be published appeared in 1975 in "Manuscritos", the Philosophy Faculty's publication. Four years
later "Purgatorio" was published, the first part of a poetic trilogy which Zurita would not conclude for another
fourteen years. The book became a huge success.

FRANCISCO XAVIER ALARCÓN (February 21, 1954 – January 15, 2016)

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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

Francisco Xavier Alarcón was a Chicano poet and educator. He was one of the few Chicano poets to have
"gained recognition while writing mostly in Spanish" within the United States. His poems have been also
translated into Irish and Swedish. He made many guest appearances at public schools so that he could help
inspire and influence young people to write their own poetry especially because he felt that children are
"natural poet.“ Alarcón wrote poetry in English, Spanish and Nahuatl, often presented to the reader in a
bilingual format. His poetry is considered minimalist in style.

REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS FROM LATIN AMERICA

LIKE HERCULES
(microstory) by Ana Maria Shua (Argentina)
translated by Steven J. Stewart

Yŏngsŏn was twenty-four. She had majored in sculpture at a prestigious art school, then married Chŏngsu, a
graduate of the same school, before the ink was dry on her diploma. It happened so quickly that most of their
friends thought the wedding invitations were a practical joke. She was already working as a graphic designer at
an Internet firm, and a friend had gotten Chŏngsu a job as a set designer for a movie producer. Yŏngsŏn's
small-scale start-up company kept her busy, but Chŏngsu was even busier. He usually worked through the
night. Movies were always produced on a tight schedule. Chŏngsu basically lived with his tool belt on. He'd
pound away for days constructing an elaborate set only to bash it to pieces within hours. That was life: good
work went completely unnoticed while carelessness was criticized ruthlessly. He had to put up with a lot of
crap. Yŏngsŏn tended to think her husband's talents were going to waste, but she kept her opinion to herself.

HONEY
(flash fiction) by Antonio Utgar (Columbia)
translated by Katherine Silver

From Colombia comes the story “Honey” by Antonio Ungar in which a young boy watches his sister cover
herself with honey: “she defies the world, she smiles and waits. Little by little her body begins to transform
getting thicker and darker.” Suspense builds from the first sentence to the end of the story. A character
fascinated by someone in peril, wrought in beautiful prose, reminds the reader of accidents along a freeway
and rubberneckers cruising by, the universality of human curiosity.

ESSENTIAL THINGS
(sudden fiction) by Jorge Luis Arzola (Cuba)
A man recalls the time he and two friends ran away from their village to sail across the sea to freedom.
I’m trying very hard to think of a single thing I enjoyed in this story. Honestly, there is nothing. The story is no
more than a collection of incoherent memories – which may or not be true – that does nothing more than bore
me. An essential thing this story is not.

YOU DIDN'T KNOW

(poem) by Idea Vilarino (Uruguay)
translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval

My poor love
you believed
that it was so
you didn’t know.
It was richer than that
it was poorer than that
it was life and you
with your eyes closed
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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

you saw your nightmares

and you called that
life.

THE DESET OF ATACAMA V

(poem) by Rail Zurita (Chile) translated by Anna Deeny

Speak of the whistle of Atacama

the wind erases like snow
the color of that plain
i. The Desert of Atacama soared over infinities of
deserts to be there
ii. Like the wind feel it pass whistling through the
leaves of the trees

iii. Look at it become transparent faraway and just

accompanied by the wind

iv. But be careful: because if ultimately the Desert

of Atacama where not where it should be the
whole world would begin to whistle through the
leaves of the trees and when we'd see ourselves
in the same never transparent whistles
in the wind swallowing the color of this pampa

TO THOSE WHO HAVE LOST EVERYTHING

(poem) by Francisco X. Alarcon (Mexico)

All of the unattributed lines in this remembrance come from Alarcón’s poem, To Those Who Have Lost
Everything. Francisco X. Alarcón is survived by his partner of over two decades, Javier Pinzón, who he was
only allowed to marry during the California legal window for gay marriage in 2008, as well as his mother, two
sisters, four brothers, nine nieces and nephews and the many students fortunate enough to have his classes at
the Santa Cruz and Davis campuses of the University of California.

21st CENTURY AFRICAN LITERATURE

1. As a Woman Grows Older by J.M Coetzee (South Africa)
2. Honey (flash fiction) by Antonio Utgar (Columbia) translated by Katherine Silver
3. Poison (science fiction) by Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa)
4. Hyde Park (creative non fiction) by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)
5. You Didn't Know (poem) by Idea Vilarino (Uruguay) translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval
6. The First Circle (poem) by Kofi Awoonor (Ghana)
7. Tonight (poem) by Ladan Osman (Somalia)

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS FROM AFRICA

J. M. COETZEE (February 9, 1940)

John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African-born novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003
Nobel Prize in Literature. He has also won the Booker Prize twice, the Jerusalem Prize, CNA Prize (thrice), the
Prix Femina étranger, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as other awards and honors, holds a
number of honorary doctorates and is one of the most acclaimed and decorated authors in the English
language. He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaide. He became an Australian citizen in 2006.

HENRIETTA ROSE-INNES (September 14, 1971)

Henrietta Rose-Innes is a South African novelist and short-story writer. She was the 2008 winner of the Caine
Prize for African Writing for her speculative-fiction story "Poison". Her novel Nineveh was shortlisted for the

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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

2012 Sunday Times Prize for Fiction and the M-Net Literary Awards. In September of that year her story
"Sanctuary" was awarded second place in the 2012 BBC (Inter)national Short Story Award.

PETINA GAPPAH (1971)

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer. She writes in English, though she also draws on Shona,
her first language. She is currently based in Berlin, where she has a DAAD Artist-in-Residence fellowship. In
2016, she was named African Literary Person of the Year by Brittle Paper. Gappah's first book, An Elegy for
Easterly, a story collection that she says is "about what it has meant to be a Zimbabwean in recent times", was
published by Faber and Faber in April 2009 in the United Kingdom and in June 2009 in the United States.

IDEA VILARINO (August 18, 1920 – April 28, 2009)

Idea Vilariño Romani was a Uruguayan poet, essayist and literary critic. She belonged to the group of
intellectuals known as "Generación del 45." In this generation, there are several writers such as Juan Carlos
Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Sarandy Cabrera, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Ángel Rama, Carlos Real de Azúa, Carlos
Maggi, Alfredo Gravina, Mario Arregui, Amanda Berenguer, Humberto Megget, Emir Rodríguez Monegal,
Gladys Castelvecchi and José Pedro Díaz among others. She also worked as a translator, composer and
lecturer.

KOFI AWOONOR (1935 – September 21, 2013)

Kofi Awoonor was a Ghanaian poet and author whose work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe
people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing
under the name George Awoonor-Williams, and was also published as Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. He taught
African literature at the University of Ghana. Professor Awoonor was among those who were killed in the
September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a participant at the
Storymoja Hay Festival.

LADAN OSMAN
Ladan Osman is a Somali-American poet and teacher. Her poetry is centered on her Somali and Muslim
heritage, and has been published in a number of prominent literary magazines. In February 2014, Osman was
named the winner of the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for her collection The Kitchen
Dweller's Testimony. The $1000 award was accompanied by the publication of her poetry anthology by the
University of Nebraska Press in conjunction with Amalion Press.

REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS FROM AFRICA

AS A WOMAN GROWS OLDER

(short story) by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)

She is visiting her daughter in Nice, her first visit there in years. Her son will fly out from the United States to
spend a few days with them, on the way to some conference or other. It interests her, this confluence of dates.
She wonders whether there has not been some collusion, whether the two of them do not have some plan,
some proposal to put to her of the kind that children put to a parent when they feel she can no longer look after
herself. So obstinate, they will have said to each other: so obstinate, so stubborn, so self-willed—how will we
get past that obstinacy of hers except by working together?

POISON
(science fiction) by Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa)

Henrietta Rose-Innes’ short story ‘Poison’ (from Homing 2010) is set in the aftermath of a chemical explosion
of cataclysmic proportions in Cape Town. The story's protagonist and narrator, Lynn, is among the last to flee
the city; she ends up alone at an abandoned highway petrol station. She sips Coke and eats crisps and waits
passively – for a rescue team, for the will to try and escape, or for the (presumably) inevitable end. The story
provides us with some clues as to her lack of motivation, although she remains enigmatic.

HYDE PARK

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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

(creative non-fiction) by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)

I was a student when I made my first visit to London. It was the summer of 1997, I was poor and on a budget. I
came just for the day, on a National Express coach from Cambridge. I was a little uneasy because the driver

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