"I emigrated to Canada with my mother the year Mon oncle Antoine debuted, the same time that the U.S. was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was flourishing. Canadian radio was given a mandate to stop playing American bubblegum round the clock. In this era of radical identity building, along came a candle-lit holiday fable set in an undertaker’s home in rural Quebec. The nephew of Antoine is a young boy coming of age in a world that no one outside his cloistered family could imagine. Mon oncle Antoine is about the sexual, material, and death’s-end taboos in a small village—and the taboo against anyone outside of it ever learning of such things. Some people puzzle over why this film keeps being called Canada’s finest decades after its release, when so many other artists have surpassed its modest ambitions. It is because of this: It was the beginning of saying, “We are not the back forty of the U.S.; we are not a trinket of the queen’s; our land and generations have given us a purchase of our own.” It was the beginning of remarkable Canadian filmmaking."

"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."