Alicia Borinsky - Critical Reception of Her Work

Critical Reception of Her Work

Alicia Borinsky has won several awards for her work, including the Latino Literature Prize in 1996 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. Literary critic and Professor of English at Princeton University, Michael Wood, said of Low Blows, "Low Blows is a book of surprises, full of turns of language and imagination which constantly catch us off guard. This is why it is so strange that we should finally know where we are, and why we are lucky to make it back to the once familiar world. We are so used to solemn failures of sight that we scarcely know what to do with lightness of glance and many-angled vision." Peter Bush, Director of the Centre for Literary Translation, writes, "No one else writing today can quite emulate her cartoon prose, a shotgun marriage of comic and camp, the Borgesian and the Barthesian." Acclaimed Argentine author of Santa Evita Tomas Eloy Martinez, writes, "Alicia Borinsky is unique, with an Argentine ear perfectly attuned to tangos and boleros...Her All Night Movie renews and transforms the genre of the picaresque novel. Borinsky is the reincarnation of Macedonio Fernandez and Julio Cortazar, as a daring and seductive storyteller in skirts." Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela writes, of Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer,The reward does not consist in the suspension of disbelief. It consists in another belief that will open wide the doors for us to go out and play." Marguerite Feitlowitz, Professor of literature at Bennington College, author of "A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of torture" is quoted in the back cover of "Golpes bajos/Low Blows" Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, March 2007 saying that "No one working today writes like Alicia Borinsky, whose words explode off the page. The voices in her work arise organically, and their accents and articulations, textures and quirks, are integral, authentic. Each of these voices (and there are scores) has its own palpable history: we feel it, even when its detailed particulars are withheld".

The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds some of her papers.

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