Dasani sings: “Black is beautiful, I am black…”. She is 11 years old, with bright, attentive eyes and perfect white teeth. Dasani lives with her seven siblings and her parents, who are chronically unemployed and have drug problems, in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. They are “the pariahs of the neighborhood” and live crammed into a room where cockroaches and rats run. To know their story “is to tell the story of New York City and, beyond that, of the United States itself,” writes journalist Andrea Elliott: a story of inequality, racism, and segregation. A researcher for The New York Times, Elliott met Dasani and her family in 2012 and published a series of reports that form the basis of this book. The author accompanied the clan for eight years and delivers a meticulous, detailed, and profound account, with historical and social perspective on their lives, from the history of their ancestors to their struggle against drugs, violence, lack of opportunities, and the ineffectiveness of social services. Extroverted, curious, and intelligent, Dasani’s path turns and takes a new direction, while her siblings are separated from their parents. An impressive, painful, moving, and remarkably written book, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize.
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The “barefoot” poet, “the daughter of the rivers,” Pablo Neruda called her. “Delia speaks and breathes in verse,” said Isabel Allende. Born in Osorno, Delia Domínguez (1931-2022) recognized herself as “granddaughter and great-granddaughter of peasants.” And her poetry is permeated with images of the south: birds, flocks, chickens, grain growers, kneaded bread, rain, and frost. But her verses do not breathe that nostalgic air of lyrical poetry. Published in 1968, this book surprises with a contemporary perspective, attentive to its time, critical of progress, and with great inner strength. It’s hard not to notice the resonance of these verses: “Evening came without us realizing it/ when you spoke softly of your war years,/ of Europe starred by enemy bombers, of a youth spent in air-raid shelters (…)/And here it was summer/ on the Pacific shore, South America:/ Chilean coast, early 1968, and/ we, entangled in our dialogue/ of combat/ Afterwards/ we didn’t even speak softly/ because it was unfair/ to sit in the peace of the evening watching the quiet flocks/ as if the whole world remained transformed/ into a bucolic print/ hung at the head of a pious young lady/ when the people of Vietnam have their sun blinded by bullets./ And all this is as real as those children/ who hang their dreams on the butt of a rifle/ calling us/ on the winds of the planet.” A great editorial rescue in the best collection of Chilean poetry.
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René Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926 and grew up in Buenos Aires, where he began his passion for comics. In the early 1950s, he returned to France and, together with cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, brought to life little Nicolas, a curious and mischievous schoolboy who experiences adventures and misadventures at school, at home, and in the neighborhood: he is an innocent child who often creates funny confusions and misunderstandings. Little Nicolas became one of France’s most beloved and popular characters. This volume collects his first escapades, created in 1955 and never before published in books, where Nicolas often turns his house upside down and gets entangled in absurd and endearing situations with his neighbors. Later, Goscinny, along with Albert Uderzo, created Asterix, an international phenomenon.
