"The Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (who was born in Honduras, grew up in El Salvador, and now lives in Iowa City) should be much better known in the United States. Every book of his I have read in English has been differently original, differently demanding. He is an intense writer, whose short novels take fierce satiric hold of a fictional concept and squeeze and squeeze. His work is political but intimate, and no more so than in this early book, a work of homage to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Edgardo Vega, a Salvadoran professor living in Canada, returns to El Salvador to attend his mother’s funeral. In a bar, he sits and rants, for hours on end, to an interlocutor who has the author’s own name, about everything he finds detestable in Salvadoran life, from the country’s beer to its writers, from its food to its politics. It’s not the book I would recommend to a reader who had never encountered this unusual writer—that would be his great novella “Senselessness”—but it’s an interesting exercise in both imitation and self-exorcism (Castellanos Moya has said that he wrote it, in part, to rid himself of the influence of Bernhard); and if, like me, you are drawn to novelists who are bloody good ranters (Philip Roth being our great American example), you will be likewise drawn to this peculiarly compulsive novel."

"Finally, we’re going to go with a film that is so culturally relevant that as soon as I say it you’ll be able to quote at least one line from it. We’re going to go with Dirty Dancing. Because, come on, nobody puts Baby in a corner, right? Of course it’s been acted out, it’s been referenced in numerous films. It was in Crazy, Stupid, Love. This is the move that Ryan Gosling does to get the girls, right? And he and Emma Stone reenact this scene. So, you want to talk about a film that just had an amazing soundtrack, the performances were great, and it speaks to the confusion of teenagers growing up, but not in a, I feel like, a “loner” teenager way. There’s been a lot of teenage films where they feel like a loner. This is someone who liked her family, and she was a little irritated with her older sister as siblings tend to be, but she liked her dad and her mom, and when push came to shove at various points, she ran to her dad to help. There was something striking about how all of that worked together in a film that just made you feel good and want to dance and want to take someone to see, and then, how many years later, that film still holds up. And if you don’t believe me, go watch it. It still works."