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In this @stltoday.com feature, @isanchezprado.bsky.social author of “Taco,” explained why tacos are more than just their ingredients. Check out the full story: https://bit.ly/3XdQPyQ 📚💙 #FoodSky #LiteraryStudies @bloomsburylit.bsky.social#FoodSky

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a movie in which every shot is gorgeous, with four actors at the top of their talents, perhaps Del Toro’s best film in English, though suffering from his Achilles’ heel of the uneven screenplay, which delivers a second half much better than the first one.

Duplessis’ Drafts is one of the most powerful and brilliant poems in the English language in recent times, 114 cantos wrote over forty years, full of experimentation and rigor on poetic language, with dialogues that range from Mallarme and Pound to Williams Olson. Loved it.

Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, a dynamic, beautiful, imaginative take on Ibsen’s powerful play, shining through fiery, delicious performances of Tessa Thompson, Nina Hoss and Imogen Poots. In Prime Video.

Mexican movie alert, Mesa de Regalos, my favorite Mexican romcom of the past three or four years, and currently the highest grossing Mexican film of 2025 dropped in Hulu today. (And yes, it does have English subtitles).

In an oven pan, put two pounds of of tomatoes or tomatillos or a mix , half a sliced onion, five garlic cloves in husk and if using, fresh jalapeños or serranos or habaneros. Or you can instead use toasted dry árbol. Remove garlic when roasted. Let everything else char, and blend, process or mash.

Last week’s film arrivals.

Plane reading today, four delicate and precise novellas by one of my favorite writers from my college years

The Bay Area harvest!

The four excellent new albums I’m enjoying this week.

Michelle Garza Cervera’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle follows her preoccupation with the horror of motherhood from Huesera to this remake of a 1992 thriller with great performances and good moments, but that never fully coalesces. In Hulu.

Taco in the wild at the bookstore both I and my credit card love, Subterranean Books in the Delmar Loop, where it made the top 10 bestselling book board! (Thanks local peeps!)

San Francisco friends! I will be presenting my book Taco at the Medicine for Nightmares bookstore next Saturday at 4 PM! Full info below

My Houston travel reads, two long-postponed Mexican novels, Herrasti’s book on Genji and Mishima in the key of Bolaño’s La parte de Los críticos and Leal’s update of Garro about La Soledad as a space narrator, both very good and underread, counterpointed by two pocket classics

Taco in the wild at two Houston bookstores: Basket on top, Brazos in the bottom.

Thank you to Daniel Neman of the ST Louis Post dispatch for this feature on my book. www.stltoday.com/life-enterta...

I am very grateful to Basket books in Houston for hosting a presentation and reading of Taco last night! (Photos by Kako Escalona)

Tonight at 7, in Basket Books and Art in Houston,

I’ve been gathering my Krasznahorkai books for re-reading. Still have to find two in English (War and Wind) and two in Spanish (Seiobo and Isaias), likely lost in the unorganized parts of my library in storage…

3:00 AM reading

Got home and in the highway I heard these true masterpieces of albums by two of the very best Mexican musicians out there that came out on Friday.

Taco in the wild at Exile in Bookville, Chicago, accompanied by Physics for Cats and Mexican poet and essayist Gabriel Zaid

Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You, a lovely comedy of manners about a young woman who brings her poet boyfriend to meet her parents, a masterclass on how to write and perform awkward dialogue. In festivals

the US govt has mounted a repeal of the right to culture. There is simply no other way to understand dismantling Dept of Ed, PBS, NPR, NEH, NEA + IMLS, defunding universities, censorship of artists, attack on equal access to institutions,+ erosion of free speech. hyperallergic.com/1049388/how-...

I bought a T-Shirt for today’s pub date of my book Taco. Here is info on where to find it, including upcoming presentations: open.substack.com/pub/ignacios...

Raoul Peck’s Orwell 2+2=5, a characteristically lucid and meandering film essay using old George’s essays as a lens to understand the culture of compulsory lies and newspeak that accompanies recent atrocities and the current rise of totalitarianism. In theaters.

Congratulations @isanchezprado.bsky.social on the wonderful new Object Lesson on the taco 🌮!! But buyer beware: this book makes your mouth water 😋

"The right to culture is fundamental, and its revocation has grave consequences for the texture of daily life." You should definitely read this, by @annakornbluh.bsky.social and @isanchezprado.bsky.social

Culture might seem a less consequential right than free assembly+ its infringement makes less spectacular news than repressive violence. But the repeal of the right to culture is grave. honored to be with @isanchezprado.bsky.social in @hyperallergic.com today! hyperallergic.com/1049388/how-...

Good morning! My comrade @annakornbluh.bsky.social and I published today in Hyperallrgic ean op-ed about the gutting of our right to culture and the ways to defend and fight back. Link below!

Late night story time

Assorted new arrivals

Morning read

Late night novella, gorgeous and spectral, a very refined version of Fosse’s style, very much concerned with the insterstitial as a narrative problem.

Arrow’s 4K edition of Kim Jee-Woon’s Manchurian western The Good, the Bad and the Weird, a masterful remix of Leone’s classic produced in spectacular scale, with arguably one of the best chase scenes in the history of cinema, featuring both the Korean and the international cuts.

this marc jacobs suit looks like a spanish textbook

I’m writing about this wonderful film by Mexican director Dana Rotberg, who moved to New Zealand after being moved by the film Whale Rider and worked collaboratively with writer Witi Ihimaera, to adapt one of his novellas into this movie about the erasure of Māori culture

My weekend soundtrack, French singer Zaho de Sagazan, who is doing excellent contemporary versions of the genre of chanson française, I here she is very popular in France, with very good reason.

Assorted film arrivals

Neo Sora’s Happyend, a stylish, earnest near-future story about being young in a society of normalizing authoritarianism, in a culturally diverse generatnion against the grain of accepted racism and xenophobia, timely no doubt. In theaters.

Catching up with Mexican lit

Iberian novellas end of week

New arrivals in mail and from bookstore pickups

Chicagoland friends! There are two presentations of my Taco books next week: first, a reading and presentation at UChicago and a Mexico-style presentation with Alfonso Fierro and Mariajosé Rodríguez Pliego at Pilsen Community books. Info in photo and links in thread below.

Empezamos el viernes con dos articulos en medios mexicanos para los que fui entrevistado. Uno es un trabajo de Guillermo Osorno sobre el 25 aniversario de Amores Perros, el otro un reportaje de Vicente Gutiérrez sobre el Nobel a Krasznahorkai. Siguen los enlaces.

Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy, a clever, crafty horror film fully told from the perspective of Indy, a gorgeous golden retriever. If you catch it in theaters, there is a small feature the explaining how it was made over three years, shooting according to the dog’s schedule