""Mutual Impressions" is a delight and a revelation, a treasury of insight and enthusiasm from both sides of the principle linguistic divide that defines this hemisphere."--Steven Kellman, author of "The Plague: Fiction and Resistance"

Introduction: Coincidence and Dissidence / Ilan Stavans 1
I. South Reading North 11
Prologue: Pedro Henríquez Ureña 13
José Martí on Walt Whitman 31
Victoria Ocampo on John Steinbeck 44
Alejo Carpentier on Herman Melville 56
Carlos Fuentes on William Styron 59
Jorge Luis Borges on Nathaniel Hawthorne 66
Gabriel García Márquez on William Faulkner 85
Hiber Conteris on Raymond Chandler 87
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada on Henry David Thoreau 107
Ilan Stavans on Julia Alvarez 113
Derek Walcott on V. S. Naipaul 119
José Bianco on Ambrose Bierce 129
Antonio Benítez Rojo on Lafcadio Hearn 135
Juan Carlos Onetti on Vladimir Nabokov 140
Mario Vargas Llosa on Ernest Hemingway 143
Nicolás Guillén on Langston Hughes 151
Octavio Paz on William Carlos Williams 155
Pablo Neruda on Robert Frost 165
Julio Cortázar on Edgar Allan Poe 168
II. North Reading South 177
Prologue / John Barth 179
John Updike on Augusto Roa Bastos 191
Grace Paley on Clarice Lispector 195
Katherine Anne Porter on José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi 198
William H. Gass on Jorge Luis Borges 228
Mark Strand on Nicanor Parra 239
Paul West on Alejo Carpentier 242
Waldo Frank on Ricardo Güiraldes 249
Barbara Probst Solomon on Teresa de la Parra 252
Robert Bly on Pablo Neruda 260
Kenneth Rexroth on Homero Aridjis 267
Robert Coover on Julio Cortázar 269
Susan Sontag on Machado de Assis 272
Thomas Pynchon on Gabriel García Márquez 282
William Kennedy on Ernesto Sábato 289
Acknowledgments 299
Index 303

Ilan Stavans, public intellectual, National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, recipient of the Latino Literature Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is Professor of Spanish at Amherst College. Among his works are Growing Up Latino, The Hispanic Condition, The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories, and A Cartoon History of Latinos in the United States. He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays and The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories.