Ascent to Glory

Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life:
García Márquez’s novel used the writer's own past to imagine, between the lines, a better future. As one of those sociologists who is a 'historian of the present,' Álvaro Santana-Acuña has reflected the Colombian writer's singular achievement. I believe his readers will be inspired to use this book, which is full of new ideas, to think more lucidly about the unusually challenging future that now lies before us, both in literature and in life.

Michèle Lamont, past president of the American Sociological Association:
In this work of love and true scholarship, Santana-Acuña opens new vistas for how to make sense of world literature today. In beautifully crafted prose, his meticulous analysis delights and enlightens about how it happens that creative work first gets legs and goes on to take new life and meaning again and again, for different people across many contexts and times. Academics and the general public alike will emerge from Ascent to Glory with a sense of satisfaction and improved understanding. I recommend it to all those who appreciate global works of art, literary or otherwise, or literature tout court.

Claudio E. Benzecry, author of The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession:
Ascent to Glory is an original and important book. It's very well written, theoretically complex, and advances a compelling explanation of the processes through which Cien Años de Soledad achieved the status of a classic. Alvaro Santana Acuña is going to be a well-known and respected scholar in cultural sociology for years to come.