Kirjahaku

"RICH AND SONOROUS PROSE . . . There's plenty of reason to hope for the future of a fiction that welcomes writers with such a passionate sense of the past."-San Jose Mercury NewsOn New Year's Day, 1959, Alejandra San Jos was born in Havana, entering the world through the heart of revolution. Fearing the turmoil brewing in Cuba, her parents took Ale and fled to the shores of North America-ending up in Chicago amid a close community of Cuban refugees. As an adult, Ale becomes an interpreter, which takes her back to her homeland for the first time. There, she makes her way back through San Jos history, uncovering new fragments of truth about the relatives who struggled with their own identities so long ago. For the San Jos s, ostensibly Catholics, are actually Jews. They are conversos who converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition. As Alejandra struggles to confront what it is to be Cuban and American, Catholic and Jewish, she translates her father's troubling youthful experiences into the healing language of her own heart. "Lyrically written, Days of Awe reflects the way Cuban Spanish is spoken with poetic rhythm and frankness."-Ms."An ambitious work . . . A deft talent whose approach to sex, religion, and ethnicity is keenly provocative." -Miami Herald"With intelligent, intense writing, Obejas approaches . . . the heady climes of Cuban American stalwarts Oscar Hijuelos and Cristina Garcia."-Library Journal (starred review)

Just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month comes another brilliant bilingual poetry collection by Achy Obejas--a meditation on being a queer mom to two sons These 44 prose poems, artful yet accessible, presented in both Spanish and English versions, immerse us in the boy kingdom that Achy Obejas inhabits with her two sons. They move from the wild and divine spirit of boyhood to the everyday rhythms of family life--mac'n'cheese, television, sick days home from school. Achy carries multiple identities: she is Cuban American, lesbian, and Jewish. She captures the universality of motherhood while also illuminating the uniqueness of her queer, multilingual, multicultural family: the way her elder son looks as her as if she's "dancing with the dead" when she speaks Spanish; the way her boys prefer mac'n'cheese to tostones; the day her elder son comes home from school disquieted, then finally spills it: "A couple of boys yelled at him: Your moms are queer " The collection is divided into four parts. The first part focuses primarily on Achy's sons, and subsequent parts branch out into stories of her parents, her roots in Cuba, and her divorce.

A twenty-four-year-old Cuban lesbian seeks a place for herself in her adopted American home while learning to cope with her dysfunctional family and overwhelming memories of her life in Cuba

Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and The Story Prize Included in The Rumpus's "What to Read When You've Made it More Than Halfway Through 2017" Selected as one of Rigoberto Gonzalez's Favorite Books of 2017/Critics Pick, LA Times Jacket Copy One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of 2017 "Questions of personal and national identity percolate through the stories in Obejas's memorable short fiction collection, most of which is set in Cuba, the author's birthplace...These 10 stories show Obejas's talent, illuminating Cuban culture and the innermost lives of her characters." --Publishers Weekly "By turns searing and subtly magical, the stories in Obejas' vividly imagined collection are propelled by her characters' contradictory feelings about and unnerving experiences in Cuba...For all the human tumult and deftly sketched and reverberating historical and cultural contexts that Obejas incisively creates in these poignant, alarming tales, she also offers lyrical musings on the mysteries of the sea and the vulnerability of islands and the body. Obejas' plots are ambushing, her characters startling, her metaphors fresh, her humor caustic, and her compassion potent in these intricate and haunting stories of displacement, loss, stoicism, and realization." --Booklist "Obejas's stories demonstrate an acute understanding of being caught between two places and cultures as different as America and Cuba." --Library Journal "Achy Obejas's collection is about fictional Cuban migrants who never quite escape the land they've left." --Electric Literature "Obejas writes with gentleness, without flashy wording or gimmicks, about people trying to figure out where they belong...The language we use and the stories we tell impact the futures we can imagine, but they are also restricted by what has come before. Obejas's Cuban characters, like most Americans, have limited access to the resources they need. One gets the sense that Obejas, like the Maldivian president, thinks it is time that the world takes these systemic problems on." --Los Angeles Review of Books "Achy Obejas' superb story collection The Tower of Antilles deals with the conflicted relationships Cubans, exiles and Cuban Americans have with their homeland." --LA Times Jacket Copy The Cubans in Achy Obejas's story collection are haunted by islands: the island they fled, the island they've created, the island they were taken to or forced from, the island they long for, the island they return to, and the island that can never be home again. In "Superman," several possible story lines emerge about a 1950s Havana sex-show superstar who disappeared as soon as the revolution triumphed. "North/South" portrays a migrant family trying to cope with separation, lives on different hemispheres, and the eventual disintegration of blood ties. "The Cola of Oblivion" follows the path of a young woman who returns to Cuba, and who inadvertently uncorks a history of accommodation and betrayal among the family members who stayed behind during the revolution. In the title story, "The Tower of the Antilles," an interrogation reveals a series of fantasies about escape and a history of futility. With language that is both generous and sensual, Obejas writes about existences beset by events beyond individual control, and poignantly captures how history and fate intrude on even the most ordinary of lives.