Archive for the ‘Cuba’ Category

PIG’S FOOT by Carlos Acosta

Oscar Kortico might be living in the slums of Havana now but the story he narrates is one of voluptuous plenty — populated by a vast array of colorful characters in a seemingly idyllic setting. “In the 1800s Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre,” Kortico says, as he describes the Cuban village where his grandparents settled.

December 29, 2013 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Cuba, Debut Novel, Latin American/Caribbean, World Lit

ADIOS, HAPPY HOMELAND by Ana Menendez

I have seldom read such an extraordinary collection of stories, fascinating in their sheer inventiveness, subtly interlinked so that their images reflect and coruscate. It is not entirely right to speak of stories either. Roughly half the two dozen pieces in this collection might be called stories in the normal sense, though some are no more than brief surreal hallucinations. The rest include several poems, two sets of dictionary entries, a letter and the reply to it, a news report, and a brief history of poetry in Cuba. All the pieces are ostensibly by different authors, collected by an expatriate Irishman who introduces himself in the preface and concludes with brief biographies of all the writers involved. All of course are fictional, even the author herself: “Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance.”

August 18, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  · Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Cuba, Short Stories, Unique Narrative, World Lit

FIFTY GRAND by Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty’s latest thriller FIFTY GRAND begins in Wyoming on a frozen lake as a masked assailant forces a naked man at gunpoint to hammer a hole in the ice and then jump into the freezing water. Sobbing and begging for mercy, the man asks, “How did it come to this?” Then the novel goes back in time to answer that question.

August 18, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Cuba, Mystery/Suspense, US Frontier West, y Award Winning Author

KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block

This breathtaking thriller, originally published the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis under a pen name Lawrence Block never used before or since, is the rarest of Block’s books—and still a work of chilling relevance all these years later, with Castro and Cuba once again commanding headlines.

April 30, 2009 · Judi Clark · 3 Comments
Tags: , , ,  · Posted in: Cuba, Noir, Thriller/Spy/Caper, y Award Winning Author