we need otherness to be less alien. - Ilan Stavans

it is essential that we recognize that in the conquering efforts of the American English language, there is also a cemetery, a series of silences of other languages that have succumbed in the process.

What I look for in the classics is a message that is reinvented every time a new reader opens it. Along with the author, it is the role of the introducer and artist to make a case for that fresh take.

My advice to young writers of personal essays is made of three steps: read, read, and read. Read what the classics have left for us: Montaigne, Sor Juana, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin, Borges. Don’t only read them but read against them. Disagree and debate them. It is untrue that we write along with our contemporaries. Truth is, there is no present tense in literature: in the library, all books are together. I don’t write only for today’s readers. I write for the writers and readers of the past and of the future.