Chloe Aridjis’s latest novel, Sea Monsters, was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction in 2020.
The magic lantern is a prosaic object: a tin or wooden box, fitted with a chimney, a set of lenses and a light source. But for nearly four centuries it has animated the walls of homes and theatres, first as a device for conjuring demons and later as a form of popular entertainment. It is thought to have been invented around 1650 by the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens, to whom we also owe...
Most photographs of Aby Warburg, who was born in Hamburg in 1866, the eldest son of a Jewish banking dynasty, show a melancholy man, gaze withdrawn or staring into the distance. In others, we glimpse a different character – intense, lively, exuding a manic energy. His four brothers went into the family firm, but Warburg was more interested in other sorts of currency, trading in his...
One afternoon in June 1962 Octavio Paz and I, until then only acquainted through letters, met at the studio of the painter Juan Soriano in Mexico City. From there we went walking down Paseo de la Reforma, and he told me he had just been appointed ambassador to India, Ceylon and Pakistan. He had accepted, reluctantly, because of the scant job opportunities in Mexico. Leaving one...
Leonora Carrington would have turned 100 today. I met her in Mexico City in the early 1990s, through our family doctor, and we embarked on a friendship of nearly twenty years. Most Sunday afternoons, my parents, my sister and I would visit her at home in the Colonia Roma, arriving at five and staying until after dusk. I often wrote down my impressions, and her words verbatim, as soon as I got home.
Chloe Aridjis talks about her third novel, Sea Monsters, set in Mexico in the late 1980s, with Juliet Jacques.
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