1992 Sam Durant has his first solo exhibition at the Bliss Gallery in Pasadena.
1995 The 300th anniversary of the death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose writings are said to show the influence of the classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintilian, and Plato.
1991 Serpent’s Tail publishes Susan Bassnett’s translation of Margo Glantz’s The Family Tree: An Illustrated Novel in the United Kingdom.
August 3, 1992 Five hundred years since Christopher Columbus set out to find a westward passage to the Orient and accidentally discovered the Caribbean islands.
1998 Bicentennial of the publication of Charles Lamb’s poem “The Old Familiar Faces,” in which describes his “day of horrors.”
Circa 1998 Fifteen-year-old Valeria Luiselli buys a copy of Sergio Pitol’s Vals de mefisto in a bookstore in San Cristóbal de las Casas and imagines him to be a dead Eastern European or Russian writer.
October 27 and 28, 1999 Christie’s auctions Marilyn Monroe’s personal property, including a collection of eleven assorted Mexican soda glass tumblers.
2000 Approximately 2,400 years since the Greek dramatist Euripides, who depicted mythical characters as ordinary people, retired to a cave on the island of Salamis to write his tragedies.
December 3, 2001 Mexican experimental short-story writer Juan José Arreola dies.
2002 The number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States is estimated to be 5.3 million.
2002 Visual artist Terence Gower installs Bicycle Pavilion in the grounds of the Fundación/Colección Jumex in Ecatepec, Mexico City.
2003 Olafur Eliasson represents Denmark in the Venice Biennale.
2004 Short-story writer and essayist Vivian Abenshushan is inspired by a piece of stencil art in Buenos Aires that reads, “Kill your boss: resign.”
Circa 2000
Highway buys Marilyn Monroe’s teeth in an auction in Miami.
2000 Approximately 3,000 years since Cadmus, son of Telephassa, sowed a dragon’s tooth and was surprised to see armed warriors spring from the earth.
2000 The United Nations launches its eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015.
2002 The 150th anniversary of the death of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol.
2002 Approximately 1,900 years since Tacitus wrote Dialogus de oratoribus.
2004 Posthumous publication of Uruguayan author Mario Levrero’s La novela luminosa, which includes a 450-page prologue recounting how the writer spent the grant awarded to him by the Guggenheim Foundation.
2005 One hundred years since the Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms was born twice; the author claims that his father and the midwife tried to push him back into the womb when he appeared four months prematurely.
2006 Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s novel Bonsái is published in Spain by Anagrama.
2007 Mexican critic Guillermo Sheridan begins to write his blog El minutario, hosted by Letras Libres.
2007 Yuri Herrera-Gutiérrez becomes editor of the literary magazine El perro.
2009 El Dinoparque opens in the Museo El Rehilete in Pachuca.
2010 Author Carlos Yushimito is described by Granta as “a Peruvian of Japanese forbears who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and who writes about Brazil.”
2009 Sexto Piso publishes Emiliano Monge’s novel Morirse de memoria.
2010 At age twenty-seven, while in Wisconsin, Mexican writer Laia Jufresa learns how to ride a bicycle.
2001–2010
Highway buys a plot on Calle Disneylandia and lives in seclusion.
He continues to collect local memorabilia.
2005 The 100th anniversary of the publication of G. K. Chesterton’s essay “A Piece of Chalk.”
October 13, 2006 Two hundred years since German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw Napoléon ride through the streets of Jena.
2006 El buscador de cabezas, by Guadalajara-born Antonio Ortuño, is selected as the best debut novel of the year by the newspaper Reforma.
2007 Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim is reported to be the world’s richest man.
2008 In his essay “El arte de vivir en arte,” Argentine writer and critic Alan Pauls states that fiction can be understood as “a map based on coincidences and divergences.”
July 29, 2010 Winston Churchill’s “world saving” teeth are sold for £15,200 in auction in Norfolk, England.
2010 Rubén Gallo publishes Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis.
2010 Mexican artist Damián Ortega creates a new artwork every day for a month for his exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery.
2011 Conceptual artist Abraham Cruzvillegas installs Autoconstrucción, which contains sheep, shit, and clumps of hair, at the Tate Modern.
2012 Christie’s sells Andy Warhol’s 1984 screen print Saint Apollonia: one plate at auction.
April 27, 2012 David Weiss, half of the artistic duo Fischli/Weiss, dies at age sixty-six.
June 2012 Javier Rivero posts a photograph with the caption “Kitty proofreading Jean-Paul Sartre” on his blog, Writers and Kitties.
2011–2013
Parabolic auction takes place at Saint Apolonia Church.
Highway spends the night in the “room of ghosts.”
He meets would-be writer Jacobo de Voragine and proposes that Jacobo write his dental autobiography.
Highway recovers his teeth.
November 2011 The Manhattan Guggenheim Museum describes the Italian hyperrealist artist Maurizio Cattelan as a provocateur and prankster.
March 2011 The murder of poet Javier Sicilia’s son leads to mass protests throughout Mexico against drug-related violence.
2011 Article entitled “The Musical Brain” by prolific Argentine writer César Aira appears in The New Yorker.
2012 Julián Herbert wins the Premio Jaén de Novela Inédita for the autobiographical novel Canción de tumba, which recounts the death of his mother — a former prostitute — from leukemia.
2012 Mexican poet, essayist, and translator Tedi López Mill publishes her collection of poems El libro de las explicaciones.
2013 Álvaro Enrigue’s novel Muerte súbita wins the Premio Herralde de Novela.
2013 A red fish called Oblomov dies of some kind of depression in Guadalupe Nettel’s collection of short stories El matrimonio de los peces rojos.
2013
Highway dies in the Buenos Días Motel after conducting an allegoric auction in Secret of Night.
2012 Paula Abramo publishes her collection of poems Fiat Lux.