Welcome to Litquake, San Francisco’s literary festival, now in our 17th year. Festival dates are October 7-15, 2016. Events are all-ages unless noted otherwise. Book sales are offered when and where appropriate. Events without ticket reservations are first-come first served. Click the phone icon to the right below, to download our new mobile app version!
Co-presented by City Lights and Center for the Art of Translation
Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) was known as a founder of the Latin American Boom, and influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe ("The Simón Bolívar of the novel"—Carlos Fuentes). Translator Stephen Kessler and special guests discuss Cortázar's life and read from his work. FREE
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder...and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair." —Pablo Neruda
Mauro Javier Cardenas is author of the novel The Revoutionaries Try Again. He grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in economics from Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, ZYZZYVA, Witness, BOMB, and the Antioch Review. His interviews... Read More →
Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor. His award-winning translations of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda include Forbidden Pleasures, Desolation of the Chimera, and Written in Water. He is also editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis... Read More →
Silvia Oviedo-López is a Spanish poet and translator based in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in different anthologies and journals on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the founder of Desbandada, a journal of original and translated poetry.
Katherine Silver’s translation of Literature Classes, by Julio Cortázar, will be published by New Directions in 2017. Her most recent translations include works by Martín Adán, Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, César Aira, and Jorge Luis Borges. She is currently translating... Read More →
