El Iluminado

When young Rolando Pérez falls off the cliffs outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, the mysteries begin immediately. Was he pushed or did he jump? What are the documents he's willing to give his life to protect from his family, the police, and the Catholic Church?

EL ILUMINADO is a graphic roman a clef featuring the esteemed literary critic Ilan Stavans in the role of academic-become-investigator as he tries to seek the truth about Rolando and the secret documents that reveal the mysterious sect of crypto-Jews (whose lineage is traced back to the Inquisition, and who still live today, partially concealed, in the American Southwest).

Stavans and acclaimed graphic artist Steve Sheinkin take the reader on a journey through the centuries in the quest to understand the many inter-locking mysteries of El Iluminado.

Ilan Stavans is a Mexican-born essayist and cultural critic and the author of over 20 books. Since 1993 he has been on the faculty at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture. He has also taught at various other institutions, including Columbia University. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile's Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Steve Sheinkin writes and draws the popular Rabbi Harvey graphic novels, and writes award-winning non-fiction books for young adults. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

"El Iluminado is a mystery that takes by the collar and lunges into tri-cultural religious history. It is a must-read for all who are interested in the Southwest as well as the very meaning and shaping of our spiritual legacy. It's accessible and genuine, a refreshing take with a unique voice and approach. You will enjoy, as I have, this jaunt into the marvelous enchantments of the imagination, mixed with history and culture, that all culminate in a reawakening of our heritage. Bravo-a great read, a page-turner of a book, unrivaled in its distinct voice and clarity!"

-Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Glass of Water

"El Iluminado is a mystery about the very concept of mystery and our sometimes deadly fascination with it-a tale that reveals the uncomfortable parallels between the Spanish Inquisition and modern academia. Funny and thought-provoking, a graphic novel of anti-heroic proportions."

-John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun

"A captivating tale about the Sephardic heart that still throbs, years after the conquest and the Inquisition, in the Latino heartland of New Mexico. Stavans and Sheinkin educate and thrill in this warmly felt story about memory and the search for identity in an age of global wandering."

-Ruth Behar, author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

"El Iluminado shines a brilliant light into the hidden history of New Mexico's crypto-Jews, a fascinating new chapter in the long and colorful history of the Jewish graphic novel. Part whodunit, part academic farce (David Lodge meets Raymond Carver, via a Spanglish-speaking Art Spiegelman), it is above all a crackling good read. It is also a touching meditation on self-fashioning, on Jewish identity (hidden and in plain sight), by turns shocking, funny, droll, and self-deprecating. Master storytellers, Stavans and Sheinkin prove yet again that by co-mixing words and images, the graphic novel can simultaneously show and tell history in ways unavailable to words or images alone."

-James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor and Director, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"El Iluminado proves that the graphic novel is the perfect medium for a multilayered literary mystery. Like Ellery Queen, Ilan Stavans is both author and investigator, creating a complex plot that's a satisfyingly twisty whodunit, while stirring in a rich mix of Mexican, Southwestern, and hidden Jewish history. Steve Sheinkin's calligraphic drawings are the perfect complement to Stavans' Talmudic textual layering of Inquisition archives, Nick and Nora banter, and American literary realism. Fast-moving and philosophical, El Iluminado will entertainingly persuade you that ‘The past is always fictional.'"

-N. C. Christopher Couch, author of Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics

"El Iluminado is a wondrous journey that boomerangs between the Old World and the New, between Mexico and El Norte, with Ilan Stavans on a search to find his identity in a landscape that constantly shifts, as if Krazy Kat had come to Santa Fe."

-Jerome Charyn, author of The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

"Crypto-Jews of the Southwest, your voices are about to be heard! Sheinkin and Stavans do justice to both academic scholarship and the graphic novel in this amazing new work."

-Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

"The ever prodigious Stavans has done it again. He weaves into this murder mystery much religious intrigue about the secret history of crypto-Jews in New Mexico. Stavans' writing breathes life into the characters, and co-conspirator Sheinkin brings a rhythmic pace to the panels that moves the mystery to its suspenseful end; his precise yet suggestive visual creations plant us firmly in a breathtaking New Mexico. Not since Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose have I come across such a scintillating ecclesiastical murder mystery."

-Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Your Brain on Latino Comics