Books by Ilan (Amherst College) Stavans

Explores forty-six religious, mythical, and imaginary creatures that are integral to the aboriginal worldview of Aymara, Aztecs, Incas, Maya, Nahua, Tabascos, and other cultures of Latin America.

Recounts events surrounding the recovery, in 2017, of a sixteenth-century biographical manuscript by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a crypto-Jew executed by the Inquisition in colonial Mexico.

At 9:53 on the morning of July 18, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a Renault Trafic van loaded with explosives into the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, a Jewish community center in the bustling commercial neighborhood of Once, Buenos Aires. The explosion left eighty-five people dead and over three hundred wounded. Originally published amid widespread controversy, Once@9:53am: Terror en Buenos Aires imagines the two hours before the attack through the popular format of the fotonovela. Part documentary, part fiction, this vivid retelling of Argentina's deadliest bombing depicts a vibrant, complex urban community in the hours before its identity was forever changed. This expanded English edition includes a new essay by Ilan Stavans detailing the aftermath of the attack and the faulty investigations that have yet to yield any arrests or reach resolution. A unique and powerful visual experience, Once@9:53am is both a commemoration of an atrocity that shifted Latin American Jewish identity in innumerable ways and an ingenious use of a popular format to explore the dangerous intersection of politics and religion in Latin America.

Originally published in Spanish. A graphic novel, part documentary, part fiction, using the fotonovela form to imagine the two hours before the terrorist attack against the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994. Explores the faulty police investigation of the atrocity, and minorities' vulnerability in democratic societies.