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Started in 2017, Reading the Classics with Ilan Stavans is a book series open to readers worldwide of world classics (fiction, poetry, memoir, theater) in translation or in their original English. The sessions are led by scholar Ilan Stavans, and are sponsored by Restless Books, the New York Public Library, and the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass. The program consists of a lecture portion given by Prof. Stavans, and the rest of the time is set aside for discussion of the selected reading. The meetings take place via Zoom on the second Tuesdays of the month (February through May and September through December) at 7-8:30 pm (New York City time)
Please note that this program is not recorded.
Fall 2025
Second Tuesdays of the month
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EST
Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl
Nahuatl Poems
Retold by Ilan Stavans
Book can be borrowed at
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Ilan Stavans
Jessica Scranton Photography 2021
Award-winning, internationally-renowned teacher, essayist, translator, and cultural critic Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. The recipient of many honors, his books, translated into numerous languages and adapted into film, radio, theater, and TV, include On Borrowed Words (2001), Spanglish (2003), The Disappearance (2006), Dictionary days (2008), Becoming Americans (2011), Gabriel García Marquez: The Early Days (2013), Quixote: The Novel and the World (2015), and How Yiddish Changed America and America Changed Yiddish (2020), and selected translations; Poems 2000-2020 (2021). Born in Mexico, he has translated Jorge Luis Borges, Pable Neruda, and Juan Rulfo into English, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop into Spanish, Isaac Bashevis Singer from Yiddish, Yehuda Amichai from Hebrew, and Don Quixote of La Mancha and Alice in Wonderland into Spanglish.
Photo by John Bartelstone
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