View fullsize

As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. Join And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again contributors Chloe Aridjis, Eduardo Halfon, Andrés Neuman, and publisher Ilan Stavans for a conversation on life and art in their corners of the world during the pandemic.

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante’s Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future. A portion of proceeds will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers get back on their feet after the lockdown.

This event is hosted by Powell’s Books at Portland, Oregon. Purchase And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again from Powell’s Books

When: Sunday, November 1 at 12 pm PT / 3 pm ET

Where: Powell’s Books via Zoom

Chloe Aridjis is the author of three novels, Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, Asunder, set in London's National Gallery, and Sea Monsters, recently awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Chloe has written for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award for 2020. Chloe is a member of XR Writers Rebel, a group of writers who focus on addressing the climate emergency. She lives in London.

Eduardo Halfon is the author of fourteen books of fiction published in Spanish. His latest, Mourning, published in English by Bellevue Literary Press in 2018, received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award (US), the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France), and the Premio de las Librerías de Navarra (Spain). In 2018, he was awarded the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, his country’s highest literary honor. He currently lives in Paris and holds a fellowship from Columbia University.

Andrés Neuman (1977) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he spent his childhood. The son of Argentine émigré musicians, he lives in Granada, Spain. He has a degree in Spanish Philology from the University of Granada, where he taught Latin American literature. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was included on the Bogotá-39 list. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, poems, aphorisms, and travel books. His first novel translated into English, Traveler of the Century (FSG), won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and was selected among the books of the year by El País, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Independent, and Financial Times; it was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received a Special Commendation from the jury of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His second novel translated into English, Talking to Ourselves (FSG), was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and for the Best Translated Book Award, shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and selected as the best book of the year by Typographical Era. His collection of short stories The Things We Don’t Do (published by Open Letter) was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and won the Firecracker Award for fiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses with the American Booksellers Association. His works have been translated into twenty-two languages.

Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast.”

About the Book

Also by Andrés Neuman