Johnny Payne – författare

Latin American fiction won great acclaim in the United States during the 1960s, when many North American writers and critics felt that our national writing had reached a low ebb. In this study of experimental fiction from both Americas, Johnny Payne argues that the North American reception of the "boom" in Latin American fiction distorted the historical grounding of this writing, erroneously presenting it as mainly an exotic "magical realism." He offers new readings that detail the specific, historical relation between experimental fiction and various authors' careful, deliberate deformations and reformations of the political rhetoric of the modern state.Payne juxtaposes writers from Argentina and Uruguay with North American authors, setting up suggestive parallels between the diverse but convergent practices of writers on both continents. He considers Nelson Marra in conjunction with Donald Barthelme and Gordon Lish; Teresa Porzecanski with Harry Mathews; Ricardo Piglia with John Barth; Silvia Schmid and Manuel Puig with Fanny Howe and Lydia Davis; and Jorge Luis Borges and Luisa Valenzuela with William Burroughs and Kathy Acker.With this innovative, dual-continent approach, Conquest of the New Word will be of great interest to everyone working in Latin American literature, women's studies, translation studies, creative writing, and cultural theory.

Written in an accessible style while rehearsing complex arguments about the development of poetic forms, Fierce Lyric evaluates thirty books published between 2020 and 2025, analyzing their value and meaning as examples of lyric poetry. At the same time, Johnny Payne discusses the history of the lyric poem in the West, with some excursions to the East, demonstrating how the lyric form, even more so than the epic or dramatic, proves fertile for a wide variety of contemporary poets. The lyric's metrical, prosodic, and other formal elements accommodate poetry about contemporary views of sexuality, ecological disaster, and ethnic identity. Payne shows that the lyric is mutable, hospitable both to wild experimentation and returns to traditional form, as well as many hybrids in between. Fierce Lyric combines a firm command of literary history with close readings of recent books, some by winners of national prizes and others by relative unknowns. Payne brings to this project a sense of advocacy, as he writes passionately about poetics and conducts audiences on a lively tour through contemporary lyric poetry.

These fables from highland Peru, presented in both Quechua and English, capture a rich oral tradition and illustrate many universal human themes.