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Mexican Lifestyles Books What Mexico Was Reading In 2007
Mexican Lifestyles Books What Mexico Was Reading In 2007 | What Mexico Was Reading In 2007 |
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| Written by Alex Gesheva | |
| Saturday, 12 January 2008 | |
 '"Thin," Lauren Greenfield's ground-breaking book about eating disorders, was a big seller in Mexico last year.' Literature hardly appears on the lists, perhaps explaining the conservative approach of most Mexican publishers. The year's literature titles were linked to promotion for tried-and-true favorites: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude" appeared on best-seller lists yet again as publishers celebrated the Colombian author's 80th birthday and the novel's 40th anniversary. "Noticias del Imperio," by Fernando del Paso, also surged back into buyers' hands after it was chosen as the best novel of the past 30 years in a survey from the Nexos magazine. The complex story about Maximilian of Habsburg and his wife Carlotta, the ill-fated Emperors of Mexico placed on the throne by Napoleon III, was first published in 1988. Its compelling mix of fact and fiction -- well-crafted dialogues between president Benito Juarez and his secretary, first-hand accounts of Mexican peasants, letters between a French soldier and his brother and 12 magnificent hallucinated monologues by an older, insane Carlotta - hasn't failed publishers yet. Editorial houses like Random House Mondadori, Alfaguara and Era also returned to steadily-selling favorites by Xavier Velasco, Carlos Fuentes, Hector Manjarrez and Jorge Fernandez Granados. But some Mexican readers are not impressed by the pallette of classical choices. "You'd think writing has died, judging by how few new titles come out and how much in the stores is reprinted," says Antonio Quevedo, a frustrated reader. "I read a lot of smaller editorials now, because I think the big ones just don't take enough risks on local new authors. Maybe if there was more original published literature, we would read more." |
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