Dr. Sara E. Cooper
Editor-In-Chief, Cubanabooks
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scooper@csuchico.edu

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Fiction

NEW! About Spirits & Other Mysteries
Author: Esther Díaz Llanillo
Translator(s): Manuel Martínez and Sara E. Cooper
ISBN: 978-1-944176-10-5
Summary
Díaz Llanillo is known for her blending of paranormal fantasy with black humor and metaphysical undertones; her short fiction has been described as bizarre, uncanny, absurd, macabre, intellectual and ironic. Her work explores universal questions of right and wrong, good and evil, real and unreal. The tales in this collection are set in the city of Havana, although to enter her fiction is to cross a frontier into strange spaces and imaginary worlds. Díaz Llanillo takes everyday scenes of Cuban life, rotates them on the axis of her imagination, then reveals the hallucinations, ghosts, dreams, and supernatural forces that lie beneath the surface.
Blurbs & Reviews
"An intriguing, chilling collection that demands introspection from its readers... Llanillo’s bilingual short stories explore the spiritual, macabre, and mundane." --Kirkus Review
"These stories show a profound understanding of how we are both imprisoned and freed by the myriad and complex layers of our own imaginations. Combining horror and humor, reality and fantasy, sympathy and rigorous observation, Llanillo creates characters that are deeply changed by their experiences. As are we, from reading them." —Nancy Kress, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of the Beggars in Spain series
"About Spirits and Other Mysteries/ Sobre espíritus y otros misterios reveals Díaz-Llanillo’s kinship with Kafka and Borges, with whom she shares a propensity toward allegory and metaphysics conveyed in parables characterized by temporal play. Like Silvina Ocampo, Piñera, Cortázar and Rosario Ferré, she evinces a dark and quite cynical sense of humor. The bilingual edition is essential to fill vacuums in Cuban literary history, an exceptional book worthy of serious perusal by any scholar of Cuban literature." —Jorge Febles, Professor Emeritus, University of North Florida
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Havana Is a Really Big City and Other Stories / La Habana es una ciudad bien grande y otros cuentos
Author: Mirta Yáñez
Translator(s): Sara E. Cooper, Victoria McCard, and Lizbeth Paravisini-Gebert
ISBN: 978-0-9827860-0-0
Poet, novelist, critic, and extraordinary writer of short fiction, Mirta Yañez also has worked extensively compiling anthologies of contemporary Cuban women writers. Her narrative stands out by virtue of a complex yet unmistakable Cuban flavor and a characteristic preoccupation with the social, political, and economic particularities of the island and how these affect los cubanos.
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Disconnect / Desencuentro
Author: Nancy Alonso
Translator(s): Anne Fountain
ISBN: 978-0-9827860-1-7
In Desencuentro (Disconnect), released in Spanish in 2008, Nancy Alonso makes love in all its diverse facets the essential connection between the twelve stories. Yet each one has an internal disconnect of one type or another, revealing the inherent contradictions of life itself.
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Memory of Silence / Memoria del silencio
Author: Uva de Aragón
Translator(s): Jeffrey C. Barnett
ISBN: 978-0-9827860-4-8
The Memory of Silence is de Aragón's first major novel, but it is by no means her first major literary contribution. Since her first publication in 1972, she has penned numerous works in the genres of short story, poetry, and critical essay.
Her works have been published by equally diverse presses in Spain, the United States, and Cuba. Likewise, her translated fiction has appeared in well-known anthologies, including "Not the Truth, Not A Lie" in Ann Louise Bardach's Cuba and "Round Trip" in Peter Bush's The Voice of the Turtle, among others.
Professor, poet, journalist, critic, and artist, de Aragón has spoken on Cuban themes through a wide range of media, but it is in The Memory of Silence where she has found her most resonating voice.
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Open Your Eyes and Soar
Edited by: Mary Berg, Introduction by Luisa Campuzano
Authors: Nancy Alonso, Aida Bahr, Marilyn Bobes, Sonia Bravo Utrera, Adelaida Fernández de Juan, Mylene Fernández Pintado, Ena Lucía Portela, Karla Suárez, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and Mirta Yáñez
Translator(s): Mary G. Berg, Pamela Carmell, Dick Cluster, Sara E. Cooper, Cristina de la Torre, Nancy Festinger, and Anne Fountain
ISBN: 1-893996-64-6
Thanks to a special arrangement with White Pine Press, we are able to offer this beautiful collection of short fiction through the Cubanabooks website.
The ten writers in this volume rose to prominence in the last decade of the twentieth century. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba underwent a drastic economic contraction that brought about an explosion of feminine narrative writing, largely in a need to reinforce the self-esteem so critical in times of crisis and uncertainty.
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Ophelias / Ofelias
Author: Aida Bahr
Translator(s): Dick Cluster
ISBN: 978-0-9827860-2-4
Suppose Ophelia were not a courtier's daughter in Elsinore, but a young girl left in the dry outback of the edge of nowhere while her mother pursued a dream, promising to collect her "soon"... Suppose she were a widow, confronted suddenly by keys to unknown doors, dangling from her husband's mysterious second key ring... Suppose she were a teenager longing for "real" life, or a married woman who discovers that the one she loves is actually another woman...
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The Bleeding Wound / Sangra por la herida
Author: Mirta Yáñez
Translator(s): Sara E. Cooper
ISBN: 978-0-9827860-3-1
Tones of disillusionment and wistful longing permeate the 240 pages of this novel about the passage of time, the city of Havana, and death. Within its complex structure, a concert of diverse voices narrates the compelling sagas of a generation of Cubans who embraced the 1959 socialist revolution in their adolescence, as well as today’s twenty-somethings who inherited its boons and its banes.
The common question asked throughout the novel is two-fold: where are we now? how did we get here? One of the characters, a woman who talks to herself in the park, repeatedly proffers her own answer: “And Havana is dying…"
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An Address in Havana / Domicilio Habanero
Author: María Elena Llana
Translator(s): Barbara Riess
ISBN: 978-0-9827860-3-1
Solitary characters, afflicted by real or fictitious fears. A world plagued with absurdities. This is what María Elena Llana has in store for us in her exceptional stories, told through a subjectively ironic perspective with both humor and an evenhanded cruelty.
Since the early 1960s—an exceptional period in Cuban history due to the social changes triggered by the 1959 Cuban Revolution—until well into this century, her work has been dynamic, contemporary, and based since its inception on a personally distinct voice that has challenged standard literary models.
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