Carlos Fuentes, who died on Tuesday at age 83, left in his wake a sorrowful Mexico, a mass of readers worldwide, and many hard-working translators. Rendering the writer was a complex task.

“The challenges were many and varied.” writes Alfred Mac Adam, a professor of Spanish at Barnard College, whose translations of the Mexican literary giant include the novels Christopher Unborn, The Years with Laura Diaz, and The Death of Artemio Cruz.

“Fuentes had a huge vocabulary, spoke several languages fluently, and could concoct wordplay among all those languages,” Mac Adam says in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “Sometimes he used Mexican slang (of the 1960s in particular in Christopher Unborn), which made life difficult for his translator. The important thing was to try to replicate the rhythm of his prose.”

As noted in many obituaries and tributes, Fuentes was a public intellectual whose…

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The author of a new scholarly book from Stanford University Press has become the target of criticism from an unusual source: the U.S. Department of State.

In recent weeks, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, has received media attention for Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, a book about Filipina women working as bar hostesses in the Japanese capital. Bloomberg News ran excerpts of her work. She was called the “literary lovechild of Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Wolf” by Zócalo Public Square, which said the book will “inspire indignation for reasons you didn’t expect.” Parreñas also was interviewed on The World, a program of Public Radio International. Following that broadcast, the State Department asked—essentially—for equal time.

The issue? Parreñas was highly critical of the ways in …

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Publishers’ catalogues are flooding in these days, and one of the more intriguing books on the fall 2011 list for the University Press of Kansas was That Girl: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture.

The forthcoming title, by Albright College communications scholar Katherine J. Lehman is described by the press as “the first book to focus exclusively on struggles to define the ‘single girl’ character in TV and film during a transformative period in American society.” In her take on the young, unmarried career woman, Lehman ranges widely through “unstudied film and television scripts, magazines, novels, and advertisements.” Her sources are as disparate in tone as Get Christie Love! Wonder Woman, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. “Feminist cultural history at its best!” a blurber exclaims.

A book to watch out for.

Except that now we must watch…

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As the new editor in chief at Northern Illinois University Press, Mark Heineke had to hit the ground running. Within 48 hours of leaving his job as director of promotions at the University of Chicago Press, on March 15, he was in Houston at the Organization of American Historians’ meeting representing NIUP and looking for book projects.

“You can imagine what it was like showing up at the exhibit hall,” he tells The Chronicle. “I nearly went to the wrong booth!”

Acquisitions is a new area for Heineke. “I know there are many people in scholarly publishing who view editors and marketers as being polar opposites. Or as being a part of camps with different ambitions—even conflicting ones,” he writes. “But I’ve never felt that way. You’re either a publisher or you’re not.”

“Most of us who decided to get into scholarly publishing did so because we were passionate about ideas and book…

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A new book from the University of Wisconsin Press has come under harsh criticism from sources with links to the Rwandan government.

Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights After Mass Violence is a collection of essays edited by Scott Straus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Lars Waldorf, a senior lecturer at the Center for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, in Britain.

Straus, emailing The Chronicle, says the assault started within a day of the book’s official April 18 release. The New Times, a news site he says is “widely understood to be a mouthpiece” of Rwanda’s ruling party, initiated attacks against the book and its contributors. In addition, a blog, Remaking Rwanda: Facts and Opinions on the Ground, was set up targeting several of the essayists. While formally hosted on blogspot.com,…

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Given the lead time in scholarly publishing, authors may find that world events overtake their topics—and even their titles. Occasionally, however, there’s a chance for a little adjustment.

Case in point. Last year, when Stanford University Press sent reviewers its catalog for Spring 2011, its list included a book entitled Strong Regime, Weak State about Mubarak’s Egypt. The book is an updated version of a 2006 study by Samer Soliman, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo and an activist who is a frequent commentator in the Egyptian media. Soliman’s English edition took its title in translation from the Arabic.

Trouble was, as time drew close for the book to drop, the regime was in full wobble.

Strong Regime, Weak State became The Autumn of Dictatorship. “At the time that the protesters took to the streets in Cairo, the author was reviewing the…

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Censured—and selling briskly.

As has been widely reported, Elizabeth A. Johnson, author, distinguished professor of theology at Fordham University, and religious sister of the Congregation of St. Joseph, has run afoul of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In a press release issued on March 31, the USCCB called attention to a 21-page statement by its Committee on Doctrine accusing Johnson of “misrepresentations, ambiguities, and errors” in Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, a book released in 2007 by Continuum.

(Yes, it seems that bishops can take even longer than scholarly journals to review a title.)

“The basic problem with Quest for the Living God as a work of Catholic theology is that the book does not take the faith of the Church as its starting point,” wrote the Committee. Instead, Sister Johnson “employs standards from …

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Hoping to bring Iraq’s literary scene to a wider world focus, the first issue of the Iraq Literary Review has made its debut. The Baghdad-based independent, English-language journal currently has an online home on the website of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. It is edited by Sadek R. Mohamed, along with managing editor Soheil Najm, a poet and an IWP alum.

Winter 2011 of ILR (the journal is coy as to future frequency) features essays by Samir el-Shaheikh on the poetry of Yaseen Taha Hafiz: “This is a world whose meanings are devoured by ants,” and Dhia Al-Jubaili on Murtatha Gzar’s novel The Broom of Heaven, followed by a mix of fiction and poetry.

The journal is feisty, at least in its initial editorial: Iraq’s literary output “cannot and should not be cut off from its Arab and world wellsprings,” writes the editor, Mohamed. “All previous Iraqi English…

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Rosa Luxemburg never saw her 48th birthday. The Polish-born Jewish revolutionary was assassinated on January 15, 1919, by members of the German paramilitary Freikorps, her body thrown into a Berlin canal.

Luxemburg was one of the founders of the German Communist Party and a leader of the Spartacist Insurrection in 1919, the setting of her death.

Now on March 5, the 140th anniversary of her birth, Verso will officially release a selection of her correspondence, most of which is previously untranslated. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, was translated for the English edition by George Schriver.

“As one of the most insightful theorists and original personalities of modern radicalism, Rosa Luxemburg deserves a new hearing in light of the complex problems facing efforts at social transformation today,” writes Hudis. He notes th…

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‘Tis nearly a month past Burns Night, but the 18th-century Scottish poet must be smiling all the same.

Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £1 million to the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies. The money greenlights the center’s plan to produce the first complete scholarly edition of Burns’s works, in partnership with Oxford University Press.

“Nae man can tether time or tide,” wrote Burns, however the idea is to publish six volumes over the next eight years, the U.K. Press Association reports, with six more to follow in the next decade. U.G.’s Gerry Carruthers—His locked, letter’d, braw brass collar, Shew’d him the gentleman an’ scholar”—will lead a team comprising colleagues Nigel Leask, Kirsteen McCue, Murray Pittock, and Jeremy Smith.

“Dare to be honest and fear no labour.”