A book is honored; a new play is staged

In announcing this year’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, the Modern Language Association awarded JOAN RAMON RESINA, professor of Iberian and Latin American cultures, honorable mention for his book Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image, published by Stanford University Press. The Kovacs Prize was established in 1990 by a gift from Joseph and Mimi B. Singer, parents of the late KATHERINE SINGER KOVACS, a specialist in Spanish and Latin American literature and film who taught at Stanford, the University of Southern California and Whittier College before her death in 1989. Nicolás Wey Gómez of Brown University won this year’s Kovacs Prize for his book The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, published by MIT Press. The prize is awarded for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures . . .

Reykjavik, a two-act play written by RICHARD RHODES, an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, will be staged Saturday in Monterey. The play is based on the historic summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, at which the two leaders came close to agreeing to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons. Rhodes is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The play reading will be staged with a full cast at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 5, in the Monterey Institute’s Irvine Auditorium at 499 Pierce St., Monterey, CA 93942. Admission is free and open to the public.