Alicia Borinsky


Alicia Borinsky, is a US-based Argentine novelist, poet and literary critic. Alicia Borinsky is professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. Her critical work has helped frame the discussion about the writers of the Latin American Boom or Boom latinoamericano, an important movement in Latin American literature. Among her other scholarly achievements is the introduction of the figure of Macedonio Fernández—Borges’s master—to a wider reading public, the exploration of the intersection between literary theory, cultural and gender studies and numerous works about poetry, Latino writers and World literature. Borinsky was named to the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española and awarded the "Enrique Anderson Imbert Prize" in recognition of her lifelong dedication to Arts and Literature."

Published works

  • La ventrílocua y otras canciones .
  • Epistolario de Macedonio Fernández. Reprinted 2000.
  • Ver/Ser Visto: Notas para una analítica poética.
  • Intersticios: estudios críticos de literatura hispana.
  • Mujeres tímidas y la Venus de China .
  • Macedonio Fernández y la teoría crítica: una evaluación.
  • Mina cruel,.
  • Tìmorous Women.,.
  • Mean Woman, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
  • Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Latin-American Fiction.
  • La pareja desmontable .
  • Sueños del seductor abandonado.
  • Madres Alquiladas
  • Cine Continuado,.
  • Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer , 1998. Translated into English in collaboration with Cola Franzen
  • Golpes bajos
  • La pareja desmontable/ The Collapsible Couple , 2000.
  • All Night Movie, Northwestern University Press, 2002.
  • La mujer de mi marido .
  • Las ciudades perdidas van al paraíso
  • Golpes bajos/Low Blows, University of Wisconsin Press, March 2007. Preface by Michael Wood. Translated by Cola Franzen with the author.
  • Frívolas y pecadoras.. Translated by Cola Franzen and the author.
  • Las ciudades perdidas van al paraíso / Lost cIties go to Paradise. Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2015. Translated by Regina Galasso with the author.
  • My Husband's Woman / La mujer de marido ''.'' Literal Publishing, 2016. Translated by Natasha Hakimi Zapata with the author.

    Critical reception of her work

Alicia Borinsky has won several awards for her work, including the Latino Literature Prize in 1996 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. Literary critic and Professor of English at Princeton University, Michael Wood, said of Low Blows, "Low Blows is a book of surprises, full of turns of language and imagination which constantly catch us off guard. This is why it is so strange that we should finally know where we are, and why we are lucky to make it back to the once familiar world. We are so used to solemn failures of sight that we scarcely know what to do with lightness of glance and many-angled vision." Peter Bush, Director of the Centre for Literary Translation, writes, "No one else writing today can quite emulate her cartoon prose, a shotgun marriage of comic and camp, the Borgesian and the Barthesian." Acclaimed Argentine author of Santa Evita Tomas Eloy Martinez, writes, "Alicia Borinsky is unique, with an Argentine ear perfectly attuned to tangos and boleros...Her All Night Movie renews and transforms the genre of the picaresque novel. Borinsky is the reincarnation of Macedonio Fernandez and Julio Cortazar, as a daring and seductive storyteller in skirts." Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela writes, of Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer,The reward does not consist in the suspension of disbelief. It consists in another belief that will open wide the doors for us to go out and play." Marguerite Feitlowitz, Professor of literature at Bennington College, author of "A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of torture" is quoted in the back cover of "Golpes bajos/Low Blows" Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, March 2007 saying that "No one working today writes like Alicia Borinsky, whose words explode off the page. The voices in her work arise organically, and their accents and articulations, textures and quirks, are integral, authentic. Each of these voices has its own palpable history: we feel it, even when its detailed particulars are withheld".
The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds some of her papers.