About the Author

Deborah Cohn, Associate Professor of Spanish and American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington is the author of History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (Vanderbilt University Press).

Reviews

"A splendid, engagingly written work, based on a wealth of hitherto unexplored archival material. It offers a fascinating account of how the publication and dissemination of Latin American literature in the U.S. were enmeshed in the contradictions of Cold War culture: caught between the desire to support the literary revolution of the Boom writers and the fear of revolutionary politics. Essential reading for all scholars of the Americas."
--John King, University of Warwick

"An exciting study of the Boom in translation, taking an experimental 'contrapuntal' approach to the hot-cold promotion of Latin American literature during the period of U.S. Cold War nationalism. Cohn's politico-literary history counterpoints the worlds within the U.S. that produce, consume and promote the Boom, revealing its striking success as an import-export phenomenon, both created and threatened by the relationship between literature and the state. In these days of walled borders along the U.S. South and an increasing Latino demographic within the U.S., Cohn offers a timely look back to another moment of immigration anxiety as it played itself out in the paradox of containment and dissemination of Latin American literature during the 1960s and '70s."
--Susan Gillman, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Deborah Cohn's lucid, meticulous study is a model of historical inquiry and critical acumen. Unprecedented and groundbreaking, in a field still muddled by academics who have not moved beyond political agendas and the careless shortcuts of historical amnesia, is Cohn's fair-minded retrospection of what was clearly a fiercely paradoxical era of intense cultural productivity and conflict under the deforming shadow of the Cold War."
--Suzanne Jill Levine, author of The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction

Historians will benefit from Cohn's transnational approach to Cold War issues and especially her discussion of "the relationship between literature and the state[, which] plays a key and recurrent role" in the story
--The Journal of American History

Recommended
--Choice

Through a remarkable job of exhaustive archival research, the study reveals how the promotion of Latin American literature in the United States became entangled in political interests.
--Hispania