CANR
olivarWORK TITLE: SILVER, SWORD & STONE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/15/1949
WEBSITE: http://mariearana.net/
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CANR 258
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 15, 1949, in Lima, Peru; immigrated to the United States, 1959; daughter of Jorge Enrique (an engineer) and Marie Elverine (a violinist) Arana; married Wendell B. Ward, Jr., December 18, 1972 (divorced, 1998); married Jonathan Yardley, March 21, 1999; children: Hilary Walsh, Adam Williamson Ward.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, B.A., 1971; Yale University in China, certificate of scholarship, 1976; Hong Kong University, M.A., 1977.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, critic, editor, novelist. British University, Hong Kong, lecturer in linguistics, 1978-79; Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, NY, senior editor, 1980-89; Simon & Schuster, New York, senior editor and vice president, 1989-92; Washington Post, Washington, DC, writer and editor, 1992-99, Book World, editor-in-chief, 1999-2008, writer at large, 2009—. Director and member of board of Center for Policy Research, Washington, DC, 1994-99; National Book Festival, organizer and member of the board; John W. Kluge Center’s Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South. Invited Research Scholar, Brown University, 2008-09. Current senior consultant to the Librarian of Congress.
MEMBER:National Association of Hispanic Journalists (member of board of directors, 1996-99), National Book Critics Circle (member of board of directors, 1996-2000).
AWARDS:Award for excellence in editing, ABA, 1985; Christopher Award for excellence in editing, 1986; finalist, National Book Award and PEN Memoir Award, for American Chica; Alumnae Award of the Year, Northwestern University, 2009; named John W. Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress, 2010; Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2014, for Bolivar.
WRITINGS
Editor of Studies in Bilingualism, 1978. Contributor of articles to USA Today, Civilization, Smithsonian, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, El Pais, El Comercio, and National Geographic, among other periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Marie Arana spent the first several decades of her career as a journalist, editor, and critic judging the writing of others. When her own work, a memoir titled American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, was published by Dial Press in 2001, Arana decided that it would not be reviewed in Book World, the respected weekly book review section she oversaw for the Washington Post.
Arana’s parents met in the 1940s when her father, Jorge Enrique Arana, was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her mother, Marie, was a violinist. After they married, they returned to her father’s native country of Peru, where Arana was born and spent her early childhood until the family moved to the United States in 1959. As Arana describes it in American Chica, it was a childhood “rooted to the Andean dust” in the family’s hacienda in Cartavio, Peru. Her father was working as an engineer for the multinational corporation W.R. Grace. Her mother was not welcomed into her husband’s culture, and when the couple returned to the United States and settled in Summit, New Jersey, Arana would first feel the sting of those cultural differences. She relates in her memoir that on a train ride west to visit her mother’s family in Wyoming, another passenger looked at her and remarked: “Well, I’ll be. She’s a little foreigner.” In New Jersey the Aranas were the only Hispanic family. One black girl told her: “You oughta go back where you belong.” With a father who went back and forth between Peru and the United States and an awareness of the cultural gap between her parents, Arana realized early on that she would have to be adaptable, sometimes filling the role befitting her dark Peruvian features and sometimes the role of an American girl with an American heritage.
Arana studied Russian language and literature at Northwestern University, where she received her degree in 1971. Her early marriage in 1972 to Wendell Ward took her to Hong Kong, where she received a certificate of scholarship in the Mandarin language through Yale University in China and a master’s degree in linguistics from the British University there in 1977, while she also taught linguistics. When she returned to the United States, she worked as an editor at Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich and at Simon & Schuster, dividing her time between New York and Washington, DC. Focusing on nonfiction, she worked with such authors as Eugene McCarthy and Pat Moynihan, both former U.S. senators. She also enjoyed working on fiction and edited the works of such novelists as Stanley Elkin and Manuel Puig. By 1992 Arana had joined the Washington Post as deputy book editor, and eventually she rose to editor of its weekly book review supplement, Book World.
Arana revealed in a Publishers Weekly interview with Joseph Barbato that it was a comment made on her first day on the job that marked a new beginning for her—thinking of herself as a member of a minority group. She told Barbato: “My first day on the job, the head of recruitment stopped when she saw on my forms that I was born in Lima. ‘Oh, are you a minority hire?’ she asked me, wondering how to put me down. ‘Well, I guess you could say so,’ I told her.” Arana realized she was a member of a growing group of Americans, that of a minority, and she began to serve on various committees on diversity, working to get more coverage of the Hispanic population into the newspaper. As a panel moderator for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, she realized that her sense of her own Latina identity was not easy to define. “When I was in either place, Peru or the U.S., I felt one parent was a blip,” Arana told Barbato. “My own experience was of blipping in and out; of belonging and not belonging.” It was a fellow panelist, the poet Judith Ortiz Cofer, who afterward encouraged her to write a memoir.
For Arana, writing American Chica represented more than the publication of her first book. “I had done a good job of burying the child I was. As I wrote, I found there was something very rigid and false about the armor I had built around myself. I was always the professional businesswoman who was a certain way—who would never want to have anything but a perfect life revealed,” she told Barbato. Writing the book not only transformed her emotions but brought about the end of her marriage when she realized she was in love with a fellow Washington Post staffer, the book critic Jonathan Yardley, who was reading each chapter as she finished it. Yardley came to realize that he was in love with her as well. Their lives changed dramatically as they left their respective families and eventually married. All of this dramatic change was the result of writing a book she had not set out to write.
In 1996 Arana was on a one-month media fellowship at Stanford University. When she completed her project, she researched the story of Julio Cesar Arana, an infamous Peruvian rubber baron known in the early 1900s as the “Devil of Putumayo.” He imposed cruel and unusual punishments on his workers, the thousands of indigenous peoples working the rubber plantations. His scandalous behavior was eventually exposed to international scrutiny by an Irish patriot named Roger Casement. Although Arana was told repeatedly by her family that he was not a relative, she nonetheless maintained the suspicion that he was. While sifting through the stacks of information she found at Stanford on this vicious man, Arana became absorbed in wondering what it might mean if he were a relative. Then she began to think about her childhood, caught between two different worlds.
When an enthusiastic book agent responded positively to sample pages of the book Arana had begun to write, she decided to take an eight-month leave of absence from her job at the Washington Post in order to finish it. During that time she returned to the Peru of her early childhood to explore more fully the story of the possible ancestor. Not only did she find out that she was indeed related to Julio Cesar Arana, but she had the unsettling experience of being told by a local historian that she “had his face.” It was then that she decided the book would be the story of her parents.
In her review for the New York Times Book Review, Wendy Gimbel characterized American Chica as a work that sometimes reads like “a collaboration between John Cheever and Isabel Allende. Arana’s mother and father constantly lose their balance as they stumble over cultural minefields. Of free-spirited pioneer stock, the young wife feels shackled, the prisoner of Peru’s demanding traditions. But her husband doesn’t understand her need to turn her back on the past.” Barbara Wallraff noted in her review for the Atlantic that “a person of a metaphorical turn of mind can read into this book the history of U.S.-Latin American relations, and if that’s what you feel like doing, you’ll suspect that Arana is abetting you. But the book also reads like a novel—almost. A fiction writer aiming for verisimilitude would have toned some of this material down. Surely no novelist would have had the narrator’s mother marry so many times. And no one but Gabriel García Márquez would have dared to invent an adventurer uncle who lends the household a monkey and an anteater. American Chica tells a fantastical, spellbinding tale.”
Arana noted that during the first four years of her life in Peru, a total of eighteen earthquakes shook the country. She saw those tremors, according to Donna Seaman, writing for Booklist, as “emblematic of the forces that jeopardized her family’s attempt to span the vast divide between North and South America.”
Arana became a novelist in 2006 with publication of Cellophane, a blend of magical realism and realistic fiction, set in the Amazon at the height of the Great Depression. Arana’s protagonist is the successful engineer and paper producer Don Victor Sobrevilla, who has carved out a fabulous estate, Floralinda, in the Amazon region of Peru. There he lives with his extended family, on the cusp of a changing world. His great desire has always been to create cellophane, not paper, and when he decides to redirect his mills to that production, “his life and those of the people around him change in unexpected ways, both humorous and tragic,” according to BookPage website contributor Harvey Freedenberg. As with the transparent product at the heart of this novel, Don Victor’s decision spawns an avalanche of honesty among his family: he confesses an earlier love affair to his wife, who, in turn, tells him of her own first affair at the same time Don Victor was courting her. Characters discover honesty and transparency are not always the best policies.
Cellophane, with its butterflies appearing out of a doffed hat and strange growths on the bodies of some of the characters, invited obvious comparisons to the work of other Latin American writers of magical realism such as Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. For Clark Collis, writing for Entertainment Weekly, however, despite the book’s “richly descriptive and, at times, darkly comic tone,” Cellophane did not live up to such a lofty comparison. Other reviewers had a more positive assessment of this debut novel. Pope Brock, writing in People, noted that even readers who do not like magical realism “may fall under its spell when it’s this well done.” Brock went on to call Arana’s novel a “great book.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman termed the same work a “bewitching story shaped by a profound understanding of the oneness of life,” while a Kirkus Reviews contributor found it a “pleasure to read.” Further praise came from a Publishers Weekly reviewer who described Cellophane as “a tale as bawdy, raucous and dense as the jungle whose presence encroaches on every page,” and from Miami Herald writer Fabiola Santiago, who thought it was “exquisitely written.” Santiago also noted: “Arana is a finely tuned writer who knows how to harvest her worlds and bring them to the main stage, an intellectual who delivers insight and story in any genre.” Liesl Schillinger, writing for the New York Times, was also impressed with Cellophane, commenting that Arana “has flown above her own history to construct a surreal but orderly pattern: a fiction that’s stranger than her truth but shares its bones.”
Arana is also editor of The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work: A Collection from the Washington Post Book World. Published in 2003, the book features contributions from more than fifty writers discussing various aspects of being a writer. The entries were previously published in the Washington Post column titled “The Writing Life.” Arana is also author of the book’s introduction and of the brief biographies of the writers that accompany each of their essays, which are arranged thematically in six sections: “On Becoming a Writer,” “Raw Material,” “Hunkering Down,” “Old Bottle, New Wine,” “Facing the Facts,” and “Looking Back.”
The book’s contributors are primarily professional writers, including the novelists E.L. Doctorow, Nadine Gordimer, Julia Alvarez, Alice McDermott, Scott Turow, John Edgar Wideman, Anita Desai, and Joyce Carol Oates. Nonfiction writers featured in the book include David Halberstam, Bill McKibben, and Tracy Kidder. In addition to these professional writers, other contributors include people who have specialized in other careers but who have also written books. They include E.O. Wilson and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. “This vividly enlightening and entertaining collection is highly recommended,” wrote Angela Weiler in a review for Library Journal. A Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that the book “meanders through everything from practical advice to thoughts of childhood to vague but entertaining musings on a career.” Several reviewers also commented on Arana’s contributions to the book. “In her introduction, Arana emphasizes the obvious but still necessary point that although there is much to learn from professional authors, there is no one way to write a great novel or nonfiction book,” wrote Steve Weinberg in a review for the Writer. Hazel Rochman, writing for Booklist, noted that the author’s “lively, highly readable, fairly lengthy bios capture each subject’s essence.”
Arana’s second novel, Lima Nights, was published in 2009. Calling the book “an ambitious set of narrative ingredients” in a review for Rocky Mountain News Online, A.H. Goldstein added: “Questions of race, class, colonialism and love pervade Arana’s latest novel.” The novel revolves around Carlos Bluhm and Maria Fernandez. Carlos maintains a hold on the upper- class world of Lima despite the fact that the fortunes of his prominent German Peruvian family have fallen as Peru is terrorized by rebels in 1986, when the beginning of the novel takes place. Nevertheless, Carlos has an elegant wife, and his occasional trysts with other women are brief and mean little to him. However, when he meets the fifteen-year-old Maria at a tango bar in a seedy part of town, Carlos becomes intoxicated with the young girl, who is a dark, indigenous Peruvian from the dangerous part of town.
Maria’s father was murdered, and her mother and brothers have largely succumbed to a failed life living in the poorest part of Lima. Maria, however, works hard at a grocery story and dancing in the evenings at the Lima Nights club, where she meets Carlos. “Bluhm is shocked to learn that she is only fifteen, but he can’t keep away,” wrote Donna Seaman in a review for the Los Angeles Times Online. “He finds Maria wild and joyous, the opposite of his restrained, increasingly severe wife. Determined Maria sees her golden admirer as the key to a better life.”
The first half of the novel follows Carlos and Maria as their relationship intensifies and Carlos becomes more and more focused on pleasing Maria in every way he can, much of it materially. “Skillfully blending Bluhm’s growing obsession with Maria and the demands of wife and children, the author sets the stage for tragedy,” noted Curled Up with a Good Book Web site contributor Luan Gaines. Eventually, Carlos decides to leave his wife, Sophie, and children, Fritz and Rudy, to live with Maria despite the fact that it means the loss not only of his family but also of his friends and his way of life. The second half of the novel takes place twenty years later in 2006. Carlos and Maria are still together, but their relationship has disintegrated as each sees the other in far different light than when they met. Eventually, violent emotions that have remained beneath the surface of their relationship erupt.
In a review of Lima Nights for the San Francisco Chronicle Online, Joseph Olshan noted that “the final outcome is a true, cinematic cliff-hanger that seems both poignant and right,” adding: “It is a testimony to this author’s finesse that despite a certain pull of inevitability, we are kept in suspense until the last word.” Noting that the author “explores with psychological awareness and sympathy” the intricate reasons why the relationship between Carlos and Maria finally ends badly, a Kirkus Reviews contributor went on in the same review to call the novel “brooding and elegant, much against the grain of lighthearted South American love stories.”
Arana is also the author of the introduction to Off the Page: Writers Talk about Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between. Edited by Carole Burns, the book is a collection of interviews drawn from an online chat program conducted by the Washington Post. The book includes a wide range of writers, including Richard Ford, A.S. Byatt, Doreen Baingana, and Martin Amis. A contributor to the Publishers Weekly Online called the book a “treat for avid readers and writers.”
Arana turns to biography in her 2013 work, Bolivar: American Liberator, a chronicle of the life and times of the South American revolutionary who “was almost single- handedly responsible for ending the Spanish Empire in South America,” according to Washington Post Online contributor Joseph J. Ellis. Called the “Liberator,” Bolivar was responsible for the formation of six new countries out of this former Spanish domain: Peru (Arana’s birthplace), Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Bolivia (named after the man). Bolivar also fought against slavery in the hemisphere. Arana provides a vivid portrait of Bolivar in the opening pages of her book: “For all his physical slightness—five foot six inches and a scant 130 pounds—there was an undeniable intensity to the man. His eyes were a piercing black, his gaze unsettling. His forehead was deeply lined, his cheekbones high, his teeth even and white, his smile surprising and radiant. Official portraits relay a less than imposing man: the meager chest, the impossibly thin legs, the hands as small and beautiful as a woman’s. But when Bolivar entered a room, his power was palpable. When he spoke, his voice was galvanizing. He had a magnetism that seemed to dwarf sturdier men.” Arana follows Bolivar—a product of the Enlightenment—through the battles and struggles of the 1810s and 1820s as he and his band of soldiers fought to drive the Spanish Empire out of the northwest region of South America. The author deals with victories as well as setbacks on this ultimately triumphant campaign, and also examines Bolivar’s legacy.
Arana’s biography received praise from many quarters. Ellis found it “magisterial in scope, written with flair and an almost cinematic sense of history happening.” Writing in Booklist, Brad Hooper similarly termed Bolivar a “defining, exhilarating biography,” and a work that is at the “heights of the art and craft of life-writing.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that “Arana’s dramatic narrative is appropriately grand and enthralling” in this “vivid portrait.” Likewise, a Kirkus Reviews contributor thought that “Arana ably captures the brash brilliance of this revered and vilified leader” in her “inspired biography …, with great depth given to [Bolivar’s] fulsome ideas.” Brian Renvall, reviewing Bolivar in Library Journal, commented that “this well-rounded work reveals not just an accomplished military tactician but also an able statesman.” High praise also came from DallasNews.com writer David Walton, who concluded: “Here is a biography that sparks the imagination in its depth and perception, and its unflagging narrative. What a story. What a life.”
With Silver, Sword and Stone: The Story of Latin America in Three Extraordinary Lives, Arana returns to Latin American history through the lives of three contemporary Latin Americans who represent the themes and forces that have shaped the region’s history: silver as a symbol for exploitation; the sword representing violence; and stone, which stands for religion. Arana tells the story of Leonor Gonzalez to represent the thirst for precious metals, which has informed Latin America for generations. Gonzales, 47, lives in a small village 18,000 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. A widow, she works the gold mines in the region, just as her late husband did and as the Indians were forced to do with the arrival of the Spanish. Arana puts Gonzales’ life into historical context, examining the histories of the early civilizations not only in Peru, but also in Bolivia and Mexico, which used gold and silver for religious purposes centuries before the Spanish Conquest when such precious metals were sought for their monetary value. Arana looks at violence in Latin America through the lens of Carlos Buergos, a Cuban expelled to the United States in the 1980s, and who now lives near New Orleans. Buergos fought in the Angolan civil war and through his story, Arana looks at the violence that has been a constant drumbeat from the Spanish Conquest to the wars and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the military interventions and crackdowns of today. Arana’s third biographical profile is that of the Jesuit priest, Xavier Albó, who works with the indigenous people of Bolivia. Though Albó does not put conversion at the forefront of his work, he is symbolic of the priests who traveled with the conquistadors, forcibly bringing Christianity to the populace.
Library Journal reviewer Michael Rodriguez had a varied assessment of Silver, Sword and Stone, calling it a “polished narrative,” but also found that the book’s “rigid thematic structure lacks space for deeper nuance and context.” A Kirkus Reviews critic had a much higher evaluation, noting that Arana “skillfully moves between the past and the present in this story about age-old ‘metal hunger’ and authoritarian strongmen.” The critic added: “A profoundly moving and relevant work that provides new ways of thinking about the ‘discovery of America.'”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Arana, Marie, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, Dial Press (New York, NY), 2001.
Arana, Marie, Bolivar: American Liberator, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2013.
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, June, 2001, Barbara Wallraff, review of American Chica, p. 104.
Booklist, April 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of American Chica, p. 1511; March 15, 2003, Hazel Rochman, review of The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work: A Collection from the Washington Post Book World, p. 1269; November 15, 2005, Molly McQuade, “Marie Arana, Book Critic Turned First Novelist,” p. 19; May 15, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Cellophane, p. 21; December 1, 2008, Donna Seaman, review of Lima Nights, p. 24; March 1, 2013, Brad Hooper, review of Bolivar: American Liberator, p. 16.
Christian Science Monitor, January 9, 2009, Yvonne Zipp, review of Lima Nights, p. 25.
Entertainment Weekly, May 11, 2001, review of American Chica, p. 74; June 30, 2006, Clark Collis, review of Cellophane, p. 166.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Ft. Worth, TX), August 7, 2001, Rebecca Rodriguez, “Visiting the Compelling World of an ‘American Chica.’”
Hispanic, September, 2001, Gigi Anders, “Marie Arana: American Chica,” interview with author, p. 102.
Houston Chronicle (Houston, TX), August 22, 2001, Malinda Nash, “Life from Both Sides: Marie Arana Memoir Probes Her Family’s Biculturalism.”
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2006, review of Cellophane, p. 475; February 15, 2003, review of The Writing Life, p. 280; October 15, 2008, review of Lima Nights; February 1, 2013, review of Bolivar; June 15, 2019, review of Silver, Sword and Stone: Three Crucibles of the Latin American Story.
Library Journal, April 15, 2001, Adriana Lopez, review of American Chica, p. 106, and Rebecca Miller, “Bridging a Bicultural Divide,” interview with author, p. 112; April 1, 2003, Angela Weiler, review of The Writing Life, p. 111; June 15, 2006, Jennifer Stidham, review of Cellophane, p. 54; November 15, 2008, Jenn B. Stidham, review of Lima Nights, p. 59; April 1, 2013, Brian Renvall, review of Bolivar, p. 87; June 27, 2019, Michael Rodriguez, review of Silver, Sword and Stone.
Miami Herald (Miami, FL), July 5, 2006, Fabiola Santiago, review of Cellophane.
New York Times, July 16, 2006, Liesl Schillinger, “A Wilderness of Mud,” review of Cellophane.
New York Times Book Review, May 13, 2001, Wendy Gimbel, “Bilingual Education: Born to a Peruvian Father and an American Mother, Author Examines Her Hyphenated Life,” p. 7; February 8, 2009, Jan Stuart, “Obsession,” review of Lima Nights, p. 19; April 7, 2013, Paul Berman, “Founding Father,” review of Bolivar, p. 14.
People, July 3, 2006, Pope Brock, review of Cellophane, p. 47.
Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2001, review of American Chica, p. 48; June 4, 2001, Joseph Barbato, “Uniting Worlds through Language,” interview with author, p. 51; April 24, 2006, review of Cellophane, p. 37; October 20, 2008, review of Lima Nights, p. 34; February 18, 2013, review of Bolivar, p. 57.
Writer, September, 2003, Steve Weinberg, “New Collections on Writing Are Meant to Be Savored,” review of The Writing Life, p. 45.
ONLINE
Beattie’s Book Blog, http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/ (December 31, 2008), “Marie Arana Leaves the Washington Post’s Book World.”
BookPage, http://www.bookpage.com/ (December 18, 2006), Harvey Freedenberg, review of Cellophane.
Boston Globe Online, http://www.boston.com/ (January 11, 2009), Amanda Heller, “Short Takes,” review of Lima Nights.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (January 17, 2009), Beth Kephart, review of Lima Nights.
Cleveland Plain Dealer Online, http://www.cleveland.com/ (April 10, 2013), Earl Spike, review of Bolivar.
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (June 19, 2009), Luan Gaines, review of Lima Nights.
DallasNews.com, http://www.dallasnews.com/ (April 19, 2013), David Walton, review of Bolivar.
Emprise Review, http://muttsbane.com/ (June 19, 2009), Karen Rigby, “Tango between Two Worlds: Marie Arana,” review of Lima Nights.
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (July 22, 2019), “Marie Arana.”
Literary Kicks, http://www.litkicks.com/ (February 8, 2009), Levi Asher, “Reviewing the Review.”
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (January 4, 2009), Donna Seaman, review of Lima Nights.
Marie Arana website, http://mariearana.net/ (July 22, 2019).
PEN International San Miguel Center website, https://www.discoversma.com/ (March 5, 2019 ), Signe Hammer, review of Silver, Sword, and Stone.
Publishers Weekly Online, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (January 7, 2008), review of Off the Page: Writers Talk about Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between; (June 25, 2019), review of Silver, Sword and Stone.
Rocky Mountain News Online, http://m.rockymountainnews.com/ (January 8, 2009), A.H. Goldstein, review of Lima Nights.
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (July 15, 1999), Craig Offman, “Washington Post Book World Editor Steps Down.”
San Francisco Chronicle Online, http://www.sfgate.com/ (December 28, 2008), Joseph Olshan, review of Lima Nights.
Spanish Journal Online, http://www.spanishjournal.com/ (June 19, 2009), review of Lima Nights.
Washington Independent Writers, http://www.washwriter.org/ (December 18, 2006), “Marie Arana.”
Washington Post Online, http://articles.washintonpost.com/ (September 13, 2001), “Testimonials: Marie Arana”; (December 10, 2007) Carole Burns, “Off the Page: Marie Arana and Richard Bausch,” interview with author; (April 5, 2013), Joseph J. Ellis, review of Bolivar.
Marie is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction, senior advisor to the U.S. Librarian of Congress, director of the National Book Festival, the John W. Kluge Center’s Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, and a Writer at Large for the Washington Post. For many years, she was editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s literary section, Book World. She has also written for the New York Times, the National Geographic, the International Herald Tribune, Spain’s El País, and Peru’s El Comercio, among many other publications. Her biography of Simón Bolívar won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; her memoir, American Chica, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also written two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights.
EN ESPAÑOL
Marie was born in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Peruvian father and American mother. She moved to the United States at the age of 9, and grew up in Summit, New Jersey. She completed her BA in Russian Language and Literature at Northwestern University, her MA in Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Hong Kong University, and earned a certificate of scholarship (Mandarin language) at Yale University in China.
She began her career in book publishing, becoming Vice President and Senior Editor at both Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster publishers in New York. In 1993, she started work at The Washington Post as Deputy Editor of the book review section, “Book World.” She was promoted to Editor in Chief of that section, a position she held for 10 years. In 2008, because the capital is one of the best book markets in the country and produces so many authors, “Washingtonian” magazine called her one of the Most Powerful People in Washington. In 2009, she was Northwestern University’s Alumna of the Year. Currently, she continues to write for The Washington Post, has been a guest op-ed columnist at the New York Times, and is the senior advisor on hemispheric affairs to the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington.
Marie is the author of a memoir about her bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the PEN/Memoir Award, and won the Books for a Better Life Award. She is the editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer’s craft, The Writing Life: How Writers Think and Work (2002), which is used as a textbook for writing courses in universities across the country. Her novel Cellophane, about the Peruvian Amazon, was published in 2006 and selected as a finalist for the John Sargent Prize. Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights. She has written introductions for many books on Latin America, Hispanicity and biculturalism. Her latest book is Bolívar: American Liberator, a biography of the Latin American founder Simón Bolívar, published by Simon & Schuster, and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize last year (Biography).
Marie has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For many years, she has directed literary events for international festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award as well as for the National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in numerous publications throughout the Americas and Europe.
Marie lives in Washingon, D.C. and Lima, Peru, with her husband, the literary critic Jonathan Yardley.
Marie Arana
Peru (b.1949)
Marie Arana is an editor and author. Arana has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For many years, she has directed literary events for the Americartes Festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as well as for the National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in USA Today, Civilization, Smithsonian magazine, The National Geographic, and numerous other literary publications throughout the Americas.
New Books
August 2019
(hardback)
Silver, Sword and Stone
Novels
Cellophane (2006)
Lima Nights (2008)
Non fiction
American Chica (2001)
The Writing Life (2003)
Bolivar (2013)
Silver, Sword and Stone (2019)
www.mariearana.net
Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother. Her latest book is a biography of the South American founder Simón Bolívar, "Bolívar: American Liberator," which was released in April 2013. Highly praised in the United States and Britain, it won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2014. Marie is also the author of an acclaimed memoir "American Chica," which described her bicultural childhood between North and South Americas. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN-Memoir Award, and chosen best book of the year by several publications. Her novels, "Cellophane" and "Lima Nights," are dramatically different works, the first being a rich, lush satire of the Amazon jungle, the second being a stark, urban love story set in contemporary Peru; both were cited by numerous national publications as one of the best books of the year. Her book "The Writing Life," is a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post, which explores the way writers think and work. Marie wrote the Latin American script for the film, "Girl Rising," which premiered in March 2013. Marie is the former editor in chief of "Book World" at The Washington Post and a senior consultant to the Librarian of Congress. You can find more information about her at www.mariearana.net.
Marie Arana
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Marie Arana
Arana speaking at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington, DC in 2010
Born
Marie Arana Campbell
Lima, Peru
Occupation
Author (fiction and nonfiction), Critic
Genre
American literature
Notable works
American Chica, "Cellophane," Lima Nights," "The Writing Life," "Bolívar: American Liberator"
Marie Arana (born Lima, Peru) is an author, editor, journalist, literary critic, and member of the Scholars Council at the Library of Congress.[1]
Contents
1
Biography
2
Bibliography
3
References
4
External links
Biography[edit]
Marie Arana was born in Peru, the daughter of Jorge Arana Cisneros, a Peruvian born civil engineer, and Marie Elverine Clapp, an American from Kansas and Boston, whose family has deep roots in United States. She moved with her parents to the United States at the age of 9, achieved her B.A. in Russian at Northwestern University, her M.A. in linguistics at Hong Kong University, a certificate of scholarship at Yale University in China, and began her career in book publishing, where she was vice president and senior editor at Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster.
For more than a decade she was the editor in chief of "Book World", the book review section of The Washington Post, during which time she instituted the partnership of The Washington Post with the White House (First Lady Laura Bush) and the Library of Congress (Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress) in hosting the annual National Book Festival on the Washington Mall. She is currently Co-Director of the National Book Festival.[2] Arana is a Writer at Large for The Washington Post. She is married to Jonathan Yardley, the Post's chief book critic, and has two children from a previous marriage, Lalo Walsh and Adam Ward; as well as two stepchildren, Jim Yardley and Bill Yardley.
Marie Arana is the author of a memoir about a bicultural childhood American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well as the Martha PEN/Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir); editor of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer's craft, The Writing Life (2002); and the author of Cellophane (a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon, published in 2006, and a finalist for the John Sargent Prize). Her most recent novel, published in January 2009, is Lima Nights (its Spanish edition [2013] was selected by El Comercio's chief book critic as one of the best five novels of 2013 in Peru. Arana's most recent book is "Bolívar: American Liberator," a biography of the South American revolutionary leader and founder Simon Bolivar[3] The book was published by Simon and Schuster in April 2013.[4][5] It won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography.[6] She has written introductions for many books, among them a National Geographic book of aerial photographs of South America, Through the Eyes of the Condor. and she is a frequent spokesperson on Hispanic issues, Latin America, and the book industry.
Arana has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For many years, she has directed literary events for the Americartes Festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as well as for the National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the "Virginia Quarterly Review," USA Today, Civilization, Smithsonian magazine, National Geographic, and numerous other literary publications throughout the Americas.
Arana was a Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in 1996 and then again in 1999, an Invited Research Scholar at Brown University in 2008-2009. In October 2009, Arana received the Alumna Award of the Year at Northwestern University.[7]
In April 2009, Arana was named John W. Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress through 2010. In September 2009, she was elected to the Scholars' Council of the Library of Congress as well as the Board of Directors of the National Book Festival.
Arana was scriptwriter for the Latin American portion of the film "Girl Rising," which describes the life of Senna, a 14-year-old girl in the Andean gold-mining town of La Rinconada. At 17,000 feet above sea level, it is the highest human habitation in the world. The film was part of a campaign to promote the importance of girls' education. Arana's writing about that experience, which was published in The Best American Travel Writing 2013, was named one of "the most gripping and sobering" of the year.
In March 2015, Arana directed the Iberian Suite Festival Literary Series for the Kennedy Center. In the course of seven programs, she featured more than two dozen Spanish-language and Portuguese-language writers from around the world.
In October 2015, Arana was named Chair of the Cultures of the Countries of the South, an honorary post at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. She is currently an expert advisor to national and international outreach programs of the Library of Congress, Senior Advisor to the Librarian of Congress, as well as Literary Director in charge of programming for the National Book Festival.
Bibliography[edit]
American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood. The Dial Press. 2001. ISBN 0-385-31962-2. - a memoir about a bicultural childhood; finalist for the 2001 National Book Award
The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work: A Collection from the Washington Post Book World, editor, PublicAffairs, 2002, ISBN 9781586481490
Cellophane. The Dial Press. 2006. ISBN 0-385-33664-0. - a satirical novel set in the Peruvian Amazon; finalist for the John Sargent Prize[8]
Lima Nights. The Dial Press. 2009. ISBN 9780385342599. - a love story set in contemporary Peru
"Introduction by Marie Arana". Through the Eyes of the Condor. Robert B. Haas (photographer). National Geographic. 2007. ISBN 9781426201325.[9]
Stone Offerings: Machu Picchu's Terraces of Enlightenment, photographs by Mike Torrey, Introduction by Marie Arana, Lightpoint, 2009, Winner of the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Award, Best Art Book of the Year
Bolivar: American Liberator, Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 9781439110195 - winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Award in biography.
Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is the author of the memoir American Chica, a finalist for the National Book Award; two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights; and The Writing Life, a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post. She lives in Washington, DC, and Lima, Peru.
Arana, Marie
MARIE ARANA was born in Peru, moved to the United States at the age of 9, and
completed her BA in Russian Language and Literature at Northwestern University, her
MA in Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at Hong Kong University, and an MA equivalent
(Mandarin language) at Yale University in China. She began her career in book
publishing, where she was Vice President and Senior Editor at both Harcourt Brace and
Simon & Schuster publishers in New York. In 1993, she started work at The Washington
Post as Deputy Editor of the book review section, “Book World.” She was promoted to
Editor in Chief of that section, a position she held for 10 years. In 2008, “The
Washingtonian” magazine called her one of the Most Powerful People in Washington. In
2009, she was Northwestern University’s Alumna of the Year. Since 2010, she has been a
Writer at Large for The Washington Post and a Senior Consultant on Latin American
Affairs to the U.S. Librarian of Congress.
Arana is the author of a memoir about her bicultural childhood “American Chica: Two
Worlds, One Childhood,” which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award as well
as the PEN/Memoir Award, and won the Books for a Better Life Award. She is the editor
of a collection of Washington Post essays about the writer’s craft, “The Writing Life: How
Writers Think and Work” (2002), which is used as a textbook for writing courses in
universities across the country. Her novel “Cellophane,” about the Peruvian Amazon, was
published in 2006 and selected as a finalist for the John Sargent Prize. Her most recent
novel, published in January 2009, is “Lima Nights.” She has written the introductions for
many books on Latin America, Hispanicity and biculturalism. She is the scriptwriter for
the South American portion of “Girl Rising,” a full-length feature film on education in
pockets of poverty, which will be released in March 2013. Her latest book, a biography of
the South American liberator Simón Bolívar, was published by Simon & Schuster in
April 2013. “Bolívar: American Liberator” was awarded the 2014 Los Angeles Times
Book Prize in biography.
Arana has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists. For many years, she has directed literary
events for the Americartes Festivals at the Kennedy Center. She has served as an
organizer for the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival. She has been the
chairperson of juries for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award as well as for the
National Book Critics Circle. Her commentary has been published in The Washington
Post, The New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, The Week,
Civilization, Smithsonian magazine, The National Geographic, the Virginia Quarterly
Review, El Comercio, El País, and numerous other publications throughout the Americas.
QUOTE:
skillfully moves between the past and the present in this story about age-old "metal hunger" and authoritarian strongmen.
A profoundly moving and relevant work that provides new ways of thinking about the "discovery of America."
Arana, Marie: SILVER, SWORD & STONE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2019):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Arana, Marie SILVER, SWORD & STONE Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 8, 27 ISBN: 978-1-5011-0424-4
The Peruvian-born author delves into the tripartite crux of Latin American exploitation by the Western powers.
Arana (Bolivar: American Liberator, 2013, etc.) skillfully moves between the past and the present in this story about age-old "metal hunger" and authoritarian strongmen. She begins with a poignant contemporary description of Leonor Gonzales, a woman miner aged beyond her 47 years, a mother and grandmother living and toiling in the "highest human habitation in the world," La Rinconada, in the Peruvian Andes, hunting for the illegal gold that Western mining companies need to keep economies buoyant. This lust for precious metals is a story that has haunted and corrupted this continent for centuries. Arana traces the histories of the first civilizations in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico that used the metals for religious worship, long before the rumors of their "value" became known to European powers. The early Inca, Maya, and Aztec rulers were enlightened, yet they had begun to fight among themselves; Arana notes that it wasn't until the 15th century that metal was used for killing--previously, it was the obsidian bludgeon. Not until the conquistadors landed on Latin American shores did the native peoples learn the murderous power of these shiny metals. The first meeting between Hernan Cortes and Montezuma, in 1519, marked the first fateful connection, and everything changed swiftly, according to the ancient prophesy--slaughter, plague, destruction. The numbers are telling: By 1618, Mexico's Indigenous population of about 25 million people had plunged to less than 2 million. Added to this has been the depressingly enduring legacy of autocratic rulers, and Arana pointedly explores the ways that generational trauma has been passed down to this day in a heritable form of PTSD and constant worry. "A sudden revolt, a foreign intervention, a pigheaded despot, a violent earthquake might bring down the house of cards," she writes, closing her impressively concise yet comprehensive history.
A profoundly moving and relevant work that provides new ways of thinking about the "discovery of America."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Arana, Marie: SILVER, SWORD & STONE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2019. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A588726789/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=47991d29. Accessed 10 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A588726789
QUOTE:
This polished narrative with a rigid thematic structure lacks space for deeper nuance and context
Library Journal
June 27, 2019
Michael Rodriquez
review of Silver, Sword and Stone
VERDICT This polished narrative with a rigid thematic structure lacks space for deeper nuance and context. Readers seeking a general history of Latin American should opt for Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire.
Reviewed by Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs , Jun 27, 2019
PEN: “Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles, One Millennium and the Latin American Character”
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Event Category: Presentations/Discussions
Event Tags: literary, literature, writer, and writers
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San Miguel PEN 2019 Winter Lecture:
Marie Arana
“Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles, One Millennium and the Latin American Character”
Tue, Mar 5, 6pm
In English with Spanish Supertitles
Bellas Artes Second Floor Auditorium
Hernandez Macias 75
sanmiguelpen@gmail.com
150 pesos / Students 50 pesos
How Exploitation, Violence and Religion Shaped the Latin American Character
By Signe Hammer
For a thousand years, the people of Latin America have been subject to three great forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (“silver”), violence (“sword”) and religion (“stone”). Marie Arana explores these forces in her forthcoming book, Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles of the Latin American Story. On Tuesday, March 5 at 6pm in the Bellas Artes auditorium, she will discuss the fraught history of the region of which Mexico is a part.
The story centers on people. Like her ancestors before her, Leonor Gonzales’s life has been molded by the greed for Latin America’s gold and silver. In her Peruvian village in the Andes mountains, 18,000 feet above sea level, people have been mining for gold since before the Conquest. Her husband was killed in a mineshaft collapse; now she carries and crushes surface rocks by hand for tiny flecks of gold.
Exploitation of precious metals has always involved exploitation of people. Leonor’s ancestors were no strangers to violence, having been forced into labor first by the Inca and then by the Spanish. Institutionalized by the Spanish, violence, says Arana, “became engrained during the hellish wars of Latin American independence in the nineteenth century. State terrorism, dictatorships, endless revolutions, Argentina’s Dirty War, Peru’s Shining Path, Colombia’s FARC, Mexico’s crime cartels, and twenty-first-century drug wars are its legacies.”
Religion was central to the great civilizations of Mesoamerica, and, just as they destroyed the stone gods of the other indigenous people they conquered, the Conquest aimed to replace all indigenous religions with Spanish Catholicism. But, says Arana, “like many indigenous people—from the Rio Grande to the Tierra del Fuego—Leonor accepts Catholic teachings only as they reflect the gods of her ancestors.”
Marie Arana is an author, senior advisor to the US Librarian of Congress, director of the National Book Festival, and a Writer at Large for the Washington Post. For many years, she was editor-in-chief of the Washington Post’s literary section, Book World. She has also written for the New York Times, the National Geographic, Spain’s El País, and Peru’s El Comercio, among other publications. Her biography of Simón Bolívar won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; her memoir, American Chica, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also written two acclaimed novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights.
San Miguel PEN is a chapter of PEN International, the organization of writers that fights for freedom of expression around the world. The 150-peso admission helps fund local activities and includes a free glass of wine with dinner afterwards at Vivali’s, across the street at Hernandez Macias 66. Tickets in Tesoros in the Biblioteca or at the door. For more information, visit sanmiguelpen.com.
Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles of the Latin American Story
Marie Arana. Simon & Schuster, $30 (458p) ISBN 978-1-9821-2247-8
National Book Award finalist Arana (American Chica) provides a sweeping history of Latin America through the lenses of the region’s three most significant cultural factors: minerals and imperial exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). In each part, she connects the overarching element to a person from the present day. In Part I, the story of Leonor Gonzáles, a contemporary woman working in an illegal mine, is interspersed with the narrative of plunder, murder, and enslavement by Spanish conquistadors of the 15th and 16th centuries, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. The story of Cortés’s capture of Montezuma depicts the Aztec leader with more intelligence and agency than is usual in history books. In Part II, readers meet Carlos Buergos, a Cuban immigrant to the United States who has a checkered past, and Arana connects 17th- and 18th-century slave uprisings against the Spanish to the 19th-century revolutions led by Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama. Part III traces religion in the region from the sun gods of the Incas and Aztecs to the 2013 appointment of the first Latin American pope, Francis I, weaving in the life story of Xavier Albó, a Jesuit missionary who came to Buenos Aires in 1952 and stayed. Arana’s history is as captivating as it is comprehensive. It’s a marvel for covering so much ground. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Aug.)
DETAILS
Reviewed on : 06/25/2019
Genre: Nonfiction