Steven G. Kellman (born November 15, 1947) is an American critic and academic, best known for his books Redemption:The Life of Henry Roth (2005) and The Translingual Imagination (2000).
Kellman was born in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Harpur College at Binghamton University (1967), he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969 and 1972, respectively.
Kellman has taught at the University of California campuses at Irvine and Berkeley. In 1976, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he was the university's first Ashbel Smith Professor, from 1995-2000, and is currently a professor of comparative literature, specializing in fiction, film, and criticism. [1] He was named Jack & Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature in 2023. He was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Tbilisi State University in 1980 and held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Sofia in 2000. He is married to the poet Wendy Barker.
The weekly column that Kellman wrote for the San Antonio Light from 1983 until the newspaper's demise in 1993 won the H. L. Mencken Award in 1986. He is a contributing writer for The Texas Observer and the San Antonio Current . His film reviews were awarded first place in arts criticism by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2006. His essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Bookforum, Huffingtonpost.com, Forward, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Gettysburg Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. [2] Kellman was founding president of the literary center Gemini Ink and was elected into membership in the Texas Institute of Letters. [3] He served two terms on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, from 1996-2002, and began his third term in 2009. He began his fourth term in 2012. [4] In 2010, he began serving as Vice President for Membership of the NBCC. He was a finalist for the Kukula Award for excellence in nonfiction reviewing in 2023.
Kellman's first book, The Self-Begetting Novel, appeared in 1980 and examines a subgenre of modern metafiction in which the protagonist ends up writing the novel in which he appears. Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (1985) is a study in reader theory that explores the analogy between reading and making love. In two books, The Translingual Imagination (2000) - which Peter Bush in the Times Literary Supplement called “a passionately eloquent narrative of a new translingual world behind the English Curtain" [5] - and Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003), Kellman surveyed the phenomenon of writers who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. He provided further reflections on literary translingualism in Nimble Tongues (2020). His biography of the author of the 1934 novel Call It Sleep, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (2005), received the New York Society Library Award for Biography and was hailed by Josh Lambert in the San Francisco Chronicle as “not only a necessary addition to the annals of American literature, but also a trenchant exploration of the relationship between the horrors of life and the saving power of art." [6] American Suite: A Literary History of the United States, Kellman's first book of poems, appeared in 2018. The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside, the first book-length study of the prominent public intellectual Ilan Stavans, appeared in 2019. Kellman's selected essays, Rambling Prose, appeared in 2020.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
André Philippus Brink was a South African novelist, essayist and poet. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and taught English at the University of Cape Town.
Dr. Luis Rafael Sánchez, a.k.a. "Wico" Sánchez is a Puerto Rican essayist, novelist, and short-story author who is widely considered one of the island's most outstanding contemporary playwrights. Possibly his best known play is La Pasión según Antígona Pérez, a tragedy based on the life of Olga Viscal Garriga.
Leslie Aaron Fiedler was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work incorporates the application of psychological theories to American literature. Fiedler's best known work is the book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination ... an accepted major work." This work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous—now increasingly accepted—judgement that American literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.
Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.
Salomon Isacovici was a Jewish Holocaust survivor who became a writer and businessman in Ecuador. Born in Romania, he moved to Ecuador following World War II, and co-authored with Juan Manuel Rodriguez the book Man of Ashes.
Henry Roth was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964.
Alan Kaufman is an American writer, memoirist and poet. He is the author of the memoirs Jew Boy and Drunken Angel, the novel [Matches], and is listed as editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.
Ilan Stavans is an American writer and academic. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. He is the author of Quixote (2015) and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010). He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.
San Diego State University Press is a university press that is part of San Diego State University, with noted specializations in Border Studies, Critical Theory, Latin American Studies, Cultural Studies, and comics. It is the oldest university press in the California State University system. It presently publishes books under two rubrics: CODEX, focused on critical theory, and surTEXT, focused on Latin American/Transamerican Cultural Studies. In 2006, SDSU Press also inaugurated Hyperbole Books, specializing in "publishing cutting-edge, over-the-top experiments in critical theory, literary criticism and graphic narrative."
Andrew John Gurr is a contemporary literary scholar who specializes in William Shakespeare and English Renaissance theatre.
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, dramatist, and scholar. Her notable works include Empire of Dreams (1988), Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) and United States of Banana (2011).
Harold Augenbraum is an American writer, editor, and translator. He is the former Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and former vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. Before taking up his position at the National Book Foundation in November 2004, for fifteen years Augenbraum was Director of The Mercantile Library of New York, where he established the Center for World Literature, the New York Festival of Mystery, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Proust Society of America. He has been awarded eight grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, received a Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America for distinguished service to the mystery field, and coordinated the national celebration of the John Steinbeck Centennial. He is on the advisory board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. In 2016, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is co-founder, with Alice Kaplan, of the Yale Translation Initiative at Yale University, where he is Associate Director, and from 2017 to 2019 was Acting Editor of The Yale Review.
Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Her special area of concentration was nineteenth-century England. She published, lectured, and reviewed widely in the fields of Victorian literature, theater, cultural history, and horror fiction and film.
American literature in Spanish in the United States dates back as 1610 when the Spanish explorer Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá published his epic poem Historia de Nuevo México. He was an early chronicler of the conquest of the Americas and a forerunner of Spanish-language literature in the United States given his focus on the American landscape and the customs of the people. However, it was not until the late 20th century that Spanish language literature written by Americans was regularly published in the United States.
Jerry W. Bradley is an American poet and university professor.
Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) is a postmodern novel in English, Spanish, and Spanglish by Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi. The cross-genre work is a structural hybrid of poetry, political philosophy, musical, manifesto, treatise, memoir, and drama. The work addresses tensions between Anglo-American and Hispanic-American cultures in the United States.
Latino literature is literature written by people of Latin American ancestry, often but not always in English, most notably by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, many of whom were born in the United States. The origin of the term "Latino literature" dates back to the 1960s, during the Chicano Movement, which was a social and political movement by Mexican Americans seeking equal rights and representation. At the time, the term "Chicano literature" was used to describe the work of Mexican-American writers. As the movement expanded, the term "Latino" came into use to encompass writers of various Latin American backgrounds, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures is the first novel of Spanish-born American writer Felipe Alfau (1902–1999), written in 1928 and published in 1936. The metafictional novel remained out of print until 1988 when it was reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press; its positive reception then led to the publication of Alfau's second novel Chromos in 1990, which he had written in 1948.
Jose Luis Torres-Padilla, also known by his pen name J. L. Torres, is a Puerto Rican and American fiction writer, poet, literary scholar, critic and editor. He was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico and grew up in the South Bronx. His work focuses on diasporic Puerto Rican literature and culture. He is married and has two sons.