If summer blockbusters are any sign, we’re as far from female protagonism as we were before the publication of the Second Sex. Heroes in our minds continue to be young and male.

It used to be hard to find a rap song that didn’t end with international shout-outs. The obvious question was: do they really have fans there? Turns out, they did.

It used to be hard to find a rap song that didn’t end with international shout-outs. The obvious question was: Do they really have fans there? Turns out, they did.

 “I understand literary strategies well and they nauseate me,” the Argentine author, Viscount Lascano Tegui wrote. His first book On Elegance While Sleeping, published in 1925, contains hardly any “literary strategies”; instead, it works on a basic convention, the faux diary.

The chronicle, or crónica, as it is known in Spanish, has a long and rich history in Latin America, from the conquistadores until present. National patriots like Cuban Jose Marti and Colombian Rafael Nariño, labored as much in verse and politics as they did honing their journalistic skills.

So the King of Babylon designs a labyrinth to trap the King of Arabia, but the Bedouin monarch escapes, and swears that if they ever cross paths again he’ll put him in his own labyrinth: the Arabian Desert.