Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’s old man can’t help but misbehave. He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age . . . while still holding a beer. A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.

    "Lucas de Lima's stunning book affected me so profoundly at all the stages of reading it, encountering it--before it was a book and afterwards, when it was. In the work of this extraordinary writer, the fragment is not an activity of form. It's an activity of evisceration."--Bhanu Kapil

    Edited by C.D. Wright. Translated from the Spanish by A.S. Zelman-Doring, Forrest Gander, and C.D. Wright. Forward by Raul Zurita translated by Sarah Denaci and Forrest Gander. Like a nightscape's pulsating constellations, dreams and memories are exploded wide open in RAIN OF THE FUTURE--Mejer's bracing collection of prose poetry and lyrical sequences. Her charged words reimagine one's body as a constantly shifting geography, readying us to face life's most brutal rains.

    These involve a new post-Soviet world and the realities of diasporic existence, which have a profound effect even on people like Rodríguez who have not migrated but continue to live and work in their home nation. The book’s title references Franz Kafka, whose Letters to Milena was published after his death in 1952, signals that Rodríguez participates in her city’s long cosmopolitan tradition asserted by Cuban writers and scholars of Cuban literature. Rodríguez’s youngest daughter, featured most prominently in the letters making up the collection’s centerpiece, “A Girl’s Story,” was named after Milena Jesenská, the recipient of Kafka’s letters. With the poems provided in a bilingual format, the collection will be of interest both to English readers in general (this will be the first English translation of a complete Rodríguez collection not excerpted from a larger work) and to Spanish readers unable to obtain the collection in any form, given the difficulty of distributing Cuban literature outside that country. At the end of the book Dykstra has included a critical commentary. It clarifies many of the author’s references, such as details pertaining to her family history—items Dykstra learned during lengthy discussions with the author about her work—and influences about her choices in the translation.

    A writer who is missing a leg battles isolation and looks for validation among those who would be the subjects of his research. For the first time, Mario Bellatin's novellas Flowers & Mishima's Illustrated Biography are published in one beautiful hardcover "flip" volume in both the original Spanish and English translation. Bellatin's writing is beautiful, odd, dislocating, and darkly funny. In Flowers, he shapes the story as a "construction of complicated narrative structures based upon the sum of certain objects that together form a whole." Each chapter adds to the narrative but is independent of the last. In Mishima's Illustrated Biography, the story is told from the point of view of students listening to a lecture and punctuated with images from an impossible didactic machine. Half of Mishima's story is told in text, the other half in photographs. Bellatin's language is simple, but each phrase is dense and intentionally vague. The journey through this book may be deceptively easy. Upon your return you'll find that your luggage takes a very long time to unpack

    It was called the Quilombo de Palmares. The population included fugitive slaves, Indians, a few whites, at least one Muslim, possibly some Jews. For almost a hundred years they fought off the most powerful empires in the world. They lived in large towns scattered through the hills of Pernambuco until, in desperation, they built a citadel fortress on a mountain, there to make their last stand. Their last king, Zumi, was an educated many who knew latin and had presumably studied the classics of Europe. He had been born in Palmares, captured as an infant and raised by a priest until he ran off to his birthplace to become the military leader and then king. This is not fiction. It really happened. "Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil's Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves" is the most comprehensive and carefully researched book on this topic and the only book on it in English.

    African & African American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Mar�a Rodr�guez-Alcal�, Juanamar�a Cordones-Cook, and Alexander Cordones Cook. Compiled by Juanamar�a Cordones-Cook and edited by Sara E. Cooper. Winner of the 2016 International Latino Book Award for Best Bilingual Poetry Book. This bilingual volume of poetry (with DVD) introduces the unique voice of Cuban writer Georgina Herrera, whose poetry is inspired by her African heritage. Eliseo Diego calls Herrera's work poetry of origin, pain, heartbreak, and consolation. Herrera manages to transform her pain into central aesthetic components of her work, which point to a legacy of sorrow and sacrifice. Though she indeed has suffered, Georgina Herrera possesses courage, energy, and a penetrating intelligence accompanied by a profound sense of dignity and an age-old wisdom that enable her to take to the hills in order to go on and tell us the truths of her cultural memory, of her soul, and of her vast experience accumulated over 80 years full of anxiety, exclusion, violence, and discrimination. At the end, her self- definition is of dignity and empowerment, challenging the representation imposed upon black women.

    Clarke Book Award from ReproNetwork​ After Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Castro government sought to instill a new social order. Hoping to achieve a new and egalitarian society, the state invested in policies designed to promote the well-being of women and children. Yet once the Soviet Union fell and Cuba’s economic troubles worsened, these programs began to collapse, with serious results for Cuban families.Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how, with the island’s political and economic future in question, reproduction has become the subject of heated public debates and agonizing private decisions. Drawing from several years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside Cuba’s households and medical systems. Along the way, she introduces us to the women who wrestle with the difficult question of whether they can afford a child, as well as the doctors who, with only meager resources at their disposal, struggle to balance the needs of their patients with the mandates of the state. Andaya’s groundbreaking research considers not only how socialist policies have profoundly affected the ways Cuban families imagine the future, but also how the current crisis in reproduction has deeply influenced ordinary Cubans’ views on socialism and the future of the revolution. Casting a sympathetic eye upon a troubled state, Conceiving Cuba gives new life to the notion that the personal is always political.

    Looking in particular at countries such as Brazil, Cuba, Panama, Columbia, Mexico, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Chile, this volume discusses the ways in which craft, art and design have transcended their former identities. Today, artists in these fields may address issues of not only commodification and mass production, but also social concerns of urbanization, displacement, housing and sustainability. Including the work of more than 100 artists, designers/design studios and artisans, New Territories sets out to explore the present state of design--much of which has emerged from interfaces between manufacturers, folk artisans, indigenous artists and designers--and its future.

    Stavans also focuses on the baroque style and the way Spain has built its national identity around Don Quixote. With a wealth of insight, these enlightening lectures are invaluable both for those already passionate about Cervantes' masterpiece and for those only about to discover its wonders.