Carlos Granés needs little introduction. Since the release of his Delirio americano: Una historia cultural y política de América Latina (Taurus, 2022), he has become an ever-more common presence in various political, literary, and cultural forums. Thinking through the problem of Latin America’s identity is nothing new—our ills, in fact, have always generated a hefty bibliography—but what Granés does is different. As a good anthropologist should, he has discovered the secret sap that runs through not only the art but also the politics of Latin America, which is indeed, as he has dubbed it, “American delirium”: an aspect of our identity as marvellous as it is tragic, whose most visible expression is the recurrent political, economic, and social instability that has plagued our continent since the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Building on this intuition, Granés constructs a genealogy of Latin American delirium and shows how the drive that motivated the artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century ended up being captured and instrumentalized by politicians of all stripes. I say this because the old labels of “left” and “right” are inadequate if we are to understand the populisms of the present day. In the end we discover that, to our misfortune, the delirium of our politicians has not been so different from that of our artists: both were driven by a desire to tear down and rebuild, by a thinly-veiled urge to “make history” rather than do politics, by an almost pathological narcissism hidden behind government programs in which the status of strongman or revolutionary dedicated to the cause—both sons of empty, sensationalist rhetoric—was all one needed in order to embark on the most unbridled of political experiments. Latin America, in her eternal adolescence, seems doomed to continue stumbling down the paths of history until she someday comes of age.
Carlos Granés’s work is fascinating. As an essayist himself, he has also been a consummate defender of the essay—a genre that has found a home in this journal for some time. In 2025, Taurus published El rugido de nuestro tiempo: Batallas culturales, trifulcas políticas, which is, without a doubt, Granés’s most political book. The reason why is obvious: in this work, he addresses the cultural battles of the present, showing how current leaders capitalize on performance, factional conflict, and the rhetoric of delirium as marketing strategies to claim power at any cost. Our artists, contrary to what one might suspect, have been crushed—censored or cancelled—by the various sanctimonious ideologies that have proliferated through almost all universities with an animus more punitive than liberating. “Incorrect politicians and correct artists: the worst combination,” Granés declares.
This cover feature opens with an interview by Juan Camilo Rincón—a lively dialogue in which the author lays out his principles almost from the start: “The essayist is the one who tries—the one who goes down into the basement or up into the attic—exposing themselves to blows, criticism, and labels, all in order to understand where those noises are coming from and to not leave loose ends unresolved.” These words sum up Granés’s own work, but they also sum up the exploratory exercise, built of attempts and failures, that we call the essay: a genre in which one has the right and the freedom to be wrong. For his part, in a piece titled “Carlos Granés or the End of Solitude,” Christopher Domínguez Michael claims that Granés’s books mark “a before and after.” They do away with the deeply-rooted idea of Latin America’s solitude (see Paz, García Márquez, etc.): a brutal metaphor for the supposed distance and backwardness of this part of the world, and a metaphor that is itself wrong. Granés sees our difference not as some exotic snapshot, but rather as just another snapshot of the West: “Latin America may be the Far West, but it is the West after all,” in the words of Domínguez Michael, who, if my intuition serves, also means this statement to combat first-world prejudices. The third article, “Delirium and Form: Art, Politics, and Fate in the Work of Carlos Granés,” is by Chilean writer Nicolás Bernales. In this essay, Bernales takes a wide view of Carlos Granés’s bibliography and thought. Bernales writes: “Granés’s body of work is a portrait of our torrential history. Reading it leads us to miss a certain civilizing skepticism, a line of defense against ever more warped visions of reality.” As a whole, this dossier invites us to rethink present-day politics based on what we might call a founding element: delirium, that utopian passion that has dwelled in this part of the world since Bolívar began the fight for independence from the Spanish empire. Or perhaps since before, when the first Spaniard set foot in the Americas.
Luckily, our writers have today found in literature a space for exploration and reflection on the problems of our time. Thanks to our friend and correspondent in Peru, César Ferreira, in this issue we settle our debt to the work of Peruvian poet Carmen Ollé, winner of the 2025 Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso and the 2015 Premio Casa de la Literatura Peruana. In this dossier, an essay by writer and academic Giovanna Pollarolo highlights the significance and diversity of Ollé’s work, emphasizing the fact that her literary production is as prolific as it is varied: “Ollé explores the crime novel, the essay, theatre, biography, autobiography, autofiction, the crónica, and even testimonio; but she does it all ‘her way,’ still marked, beyond all differences, by her persistent transgression, and not only in terms of genre.” Ollé has been writing since the early eighties and her work has constantly overflowed the limits between genres and registers. Sylvia Miranda’s interview with the author shows us an Ollé who reflects on the impact of her first book, Noches de adrenalina (1981); a writer concerned with the invisibilization of Peruvian literature and with how we write about migration and exile; and one who is also pondering her own new literary projects. The dossier comes complete with a brief selection of some of Carmen Ollé’s best-known poems.
This issue also includes poems by Francisco Véjar, María Auxiliadora Álvarez, and Lucas Margarit; interviews with Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, Cynthia Rimsky, Basilio Baltasar, and Luis Mateo Díez (winner of the 2023 Premio Cervantes); previews of books in translation by Juan Villoro and Mempo Giardinelli; short fiction by Silvana Vogt, Olivia Teroba, and J. J. Junieles; essays; and a section dedicated to Indigenous literature with a dossier on Irma Pineda. What’s more, this issue includes a wide range of reviews of books published throughout Latin America.
We are also happy to welcome two special guests. The first is Chilean critic and academic Joaquín Castillo, who writes about the conversations between José Donoso and Argentine writer Josefina Delgado published this year by Ediciones Universidad de Valparaíso under the title Atravesar el tiempo: Conversaciones con José Donoso. This volume brings us a dialogue essential to our understanding of the intellectual and literary career of this Chilean author.
Our second special guest is Argentine writer and editor Andrea Álvarez Mujica, a regular contributor to Latin American Literature Today. In this issue, Andrea writes about a mythical figure of Argentine rock: Luis Alberto Spinetta, a musician with a rare ability to fuse poetry and rock in a body of work that remains fresh and relevant to this day. Poetry sometimes appears where you least expect it, only to plunge back into the ocean of time like a nimble dolphin.
As I bring this note to an end, I have in mind a long list of names of those who have dedicated themselves to thinking through Latin America. I might start with the Chileans Francisco Bilbao and José Victorino Lastarria, and continue with now-canonical figures like Rodó, Mariátegui, Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, Germán Arciniegas, Vasconcelos, Edmundo O’Gorman, and Octavio Paz. Alongside them, you would have to add Leopoldo Zea, José Luis Romero, Miguel Rojas Mix, Carlos Altamirano, Ángel Rama, Beatriz Pastor, and many others who, from different disciplines and perspectives, have tried again and again to answer the same question: what is Latin America and how did we get here? Without a doubt, Carlos Granés has earned his place as a part of this long tradition of Latin American thought. Our goal is more modest: to offer a brief overview of the new ideas that have emerged from his work. I hope the readers of this new issue of LALT will find them just as interesting as we do. As usual, in her perpetual disquiet, Latin America never ceases to arouse our curiosity.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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