| Victor Perera | RITES: A Guatamalan Boyhood | ||
RITES:
A GUATEMALAN BOYHOOD
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Now in paperback for the first time, a powerful portrait of growing up a a Jewish boy in the exotic and violent world of Guatamala in the forties, with a new afterword by the author.
“Finely written, rife with careful portraits and precise evocations of atmosphere.”
“Beautifully written ... an important book to read and to share.” “Victor Perera is one of those rare writers who need never suffer the
uncertainties of translation, for besides his fluency in both English
and Spanish, he has both a Latin American and a North American sensibility.
Rites is another fine example of how affectingly he can cross from
one to the other, bringing all his insights with him.” |
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VICTOR PERERA (1934-2003), born in Guatemala, authored numerous books, including Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy, The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey, and a novel The Conversion. For Rites he won the Present Tense/Joel Cavior Award in Biography. He has also been awarded the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (1980), the PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize (1986), and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writing Award (1992-94). He was recently nominated for the 1999 IX Juan Rulfo Award for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. Perera was also a reporter for the New York Times Magazine, a staff member of the New Yorker, and a professor at UC Berkeley. He cofounded Ivri-NASAWI, a national organization celebrating Sephardic arts and culture. |