Book Beat

She’s one of Mexico’s most celebrated writers–a novelist, poet and playwright–and a distinguished lecturer at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College. Now comes the English translation of Carmen Boullosa’s 18th novel, The Book of Anna. It’s the book she imagines Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina wrote before she committed suicide: an opium-infused feminist fairy tale set against the birth of the Russian Revolution and discovered, still in manuscript form, in the attic of Karenin Palace. “It’s obvious that Tolstoy had problems with women, and I thought if she had had her book [published] her life would have been different,” Boullosa says. “He gave her the book and then he takes it away from her so I wanted to give her the book back.”

We found Boullosa quarantining in her home in Mexico City and had a free-wheeling conversation over Zoom about the book, about writing in these disconnected times and why she really doesn’t like “American Dirt.”

Related Links

About Carmen Boullosa

About “The Book of Anna”

A conversation between Carmen and her translator, Samantha Schnee 

Transcript

Opening Clip: Carmen Boullosa 

In reality I work very professionally to be a madwoman processed by her characters — not in possession, yes in a way, but mainly possessed by the story, the characters, the atmosphere. It’s a delight of a profession to be a writer.

Rick Firstman

Welcome to CUNY Book Beat. I’m Rick Firstman. Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico’s most celebrated and prolific writers–and one of CUNY’s literary treasures. She’s the author of 18 novels, 15 collections of poetry, four plays and even a screenplay. Earlier this year, Forbes Mexico named her one of the country’s most vital creative forces. Many of her works have been translated into English and other languages and the newest is “The Book of Anna,” in which Boullosa imagines the opium-induced manuscript Anna Karenina wrote just before her death in Tolstoy’s epic novel. Carmen Boullosa is a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College and co-host of CUNY TVs Nueva York, a Spanish language show about Latino culture in the city. She joined me from her home in Mexico City, where she has been hunkered down since the pandemic kept her from returning to New York, as she had planned back in March. We talked about her new book, about the writer’s life and about quarantining in Mexico City in the time of Coronavirus. Here’s our conversation.

Carmen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. You’re down in Mexico City where you grew up.

Carmen Boullosa

That’s it. It’s my city. In fact, I have to say this, but this is my, my, my city. I was born in this city. My father was born in this city. The family of my father were born in this city in the early 18th century. And so we’ll be here forever. My mother’s family is from Tabasco, but she arrived to the city when she was seven years old. So it was also her city. All my brothers and sisters were born here. My children were born here. And I arrived to New York City in 2001.

Rick Firstman

So you went down there expecting to be coming back in March and having a book tour. And so what happened?

Carmen Boullosa

Well, we have been here since mid December, since the semester finished where I was teaching that semester at McCauley Honors College.

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality: An oddball who engineered a structure that was a marvel of stability at a time when suspension bridges routinely fell down. Richard Haw, a professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written two previous books about the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of his latest–after 13 years of research–is the man behind the bridge. Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling tells one of the most fascinating American immigrant stories. Haw talks about it with Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM.

 

Related Links

About Engineering America

About Richard Haw

CUNY SUM: You Can Thank This Man for the Brooklyn Bridge

 

 

A day before his fifty-second birthday in February 1861, Abraham Lincoln boarded the Presidential Special to begin a 1,900-mile journey by rail from his Illinois home to his inauguration in Washington. It was to be a long, tumultuous and dangerous trip through hundreds of towns where millions saw and heard Lincoln as he prepared to take office with the country hurtling toward the Civil War. Historian Ted Widmer, a Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College and former presidential advisor, tells the dramatic story of Lincoln’s passage to history in Lincoln on the Verge: 13 Days to Washington. 

“It’s the story of thirteen days in the life of Lincoln. He’s been elected president, the South is seceding, Washington is falling apart and somehow out of all of this chaos he’s got to get on a train, go two thousand miles, meet millions of Americans and try to avoid an assassination attempt. . .  It’s not just to save the North, it’s to save the entire country, the United States of America, the most successful democracy on earth . . . It felt to me like something out of Greek mythology or any of the old epics from a lot of different civilizations where someone has to fight against terrible odds, almost as if the gods are against him to get to his destination to fulfill his quest. It felt bigger than a story out of American history to me.” –Ted Widmer

RELATED LINKS

More about Lincoln on the Verge

More about Ted Widmer 

The Guardian: Amid a new crisis, a timely new book on Lincoln 

From The New York Times “Disunion” series: Lincoln on the Move

CUNY SUM: Abraham Lincoln’s Harrowing 13-Day Mission to Secure the Presidency

 

 

 

 

 

In her latest collection of poems, Donna Masini, a professor of English at Hunter College, moves back and forth in time–and human experience–as she copes with her younger sister’s death and celebrates life through the communal act of movie-watching. She talks with Joe Tirella about 4:30 Movie, which is now out in paperback.

 

In March 1950, 70 years ago this month, City College made college basketball history by winning both the NIT and NCAA championships. But CCNY’s season of glory was followed by unimaginable disgrace: a point-shaving scandal that led to the arrests of seven players, traumatized the college, shook the city and forever changed college basketball. In The City Game, Matthew Goodman tells the dramatic story–a tale of post-war New York, of City College in its prime and of imperfect young heroes who paid dearly for their mistake.

Related Links

About Matthew Goodman

Recalling City’s epic victory over Kentucky

NPR review of The City Game

One of the most influential groups of the radical ’60s was the Young Lords, an organization of poor and working class Puerto Ricans that began as a street gang and rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion. Johanna Fernandez, a professor of history at Baruch College, traces their roots and tells the story of their rise and fall in The Young Lords: A Radical History. She talks about it with Beth Harpaz.

The 1940 discovery of a radioactive version of carbon — the element that is the basis for all life — led to the technique of carbon dating that transformed virtually every field of science. Carbon-14 has been used to study everything from Stone Age cultures to modern elephant poaching. How it all happened is the story John Marra, an environmental scientist at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, tells in Hot Carbon: Carbon 14 and a Revolution in Science. The book was long-listed for the 2020 PEN-E.I. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Related Links

From The Graduate Center: John Marra’s ‘Hot Carbon’ Nominated for PEN-E.I. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

From Nature: Radiocarbon revolution: the story of an isotope

From Times Higher Education: Applause for a book celebrating the many applications of carbon dating

 

CUNY’s Corey Robin–one of the foremost thinkers on American conservatism–set out to solve the puzzle of Clarence Thomas: How did a young black nationalist grow up to be the most right-wing justice on the Supreme Court–and without abandoning the core ideas that once animated him as a radical leftist? In his groundbreaking new book, Robin–a political scientist at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center– explores Thomas’s 28-year record on the court against the backdrop of his uniquely evolved vision of race.

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas “is rigorous yet readable, frequently startling yet eminently persuasive,” wrote The New York Times reviewer Jennifer Szalai. “. . . It isn’t every day that reading about ideas can be both so gratifying and unsettling, and Robin’s incisive and superbly argued book has made me think again.” Robin is also the author of  The Reactionary Mind, which The New Yorker called “the book that predicted Trump.”

 

RELATED LINKS

Read more about Corey Robin

Coming December 4 at The Graduate Center: A conversation with Corey Robin and Columbia law professor Kendall Thomas 

Read The New York Times review: ‘The Enigma of Clarence Thomas’ Makes a Strong Case for Its Provocative Thesis

Hear Robin talk about “The Reactionary Mind,” on MSNBC host Chris Hayes’s “Why is this Happening?” podcast.

In Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey, Mikhal Dekel discovers–and retraces–the agonizing three-year journey her father made as a teenager  fleeing the Nazis–from Poland to Palestine via an unlikely refuge in Iran. Dekel is a City College English professor who grew up in Israel as part of a post-war generation that was largely shielded from Holocaust history. In this CUNY Book Beat podcast, she talks about how digging into her father’s little-known survival story became a pursuit of self-identity.

From CUNY SUM: Dekel’s book is both a second-generation memoir and a deeply researched historical account that took 10 years to write. She unearthed archives, tracked down survivors, and deconstructed photos and letters. She also visited as many places on her father’s 13,000-mile journey as she could, from Tashkent and Samarkand, to an unmarked burial ground for a Russian gulag, to the Polish town of Ostrów, where their family lived for eight generations before the Nazis. “Nothing remained of Ostrów’s Jewish past,” she wrote, “no haunting, only plain, uncontested erasure.” Read more >

The New York Times: “The story at the center of this book is the way contingency shaped so many destinies. It makes these Tehran children not simply another detail of the Holocaust but a matter of enduring existential, psychological and moral reflection.”   Read the full New York Times review >

Read more about Mikhal Dekel and see a list of her upcoming speaking events

Mikhal Dekel’s father at 12 in Poland with his sister, father and uncle in 1939; and three years later (standing fifth from left) at a tent camp in Tehran. (Courtesy of Mikhal Dekel)

 

 

In “The Shadow King,” Queens College’s Maaza Mengiste digs into the history of her native Ethiopia and unearths a true-to-life story of women who fought for the right to defend their country against Mussolini’s army in the years before World War II. Nearly a decade in the making, Mengiste’s second novel is a mythic tale inspired by the stories she heard growing up–and the discoveries she made doing meticulous research in Italy and Ethiopia.

From The New York Times: “In war stories both old and new, women are nurses to the wounded, and the victims of rape — war’s unbanishable shadow. Rarely are they depicted as warriors. Is that a profound truth or a blind spot? Maaza Mengiste’s lyrical, remarkable new novel, “The Shadow King,” set during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, somehow manages to solve the riddle . . .[A]ll this grandeur, all this grace, is in the service of a tale of a woman, Hirut, as indelible and compelling a hero as any I’ve read in years. This novel made me feel pity and fear, and more times than is reasonable, gave me goose bumps.”  

 

Read the New York Times review 

* Learn more about Maaze Mengiste and see a list of her upcoming talks