In the Cold of the Malecn

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Description

Set in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union - a period of blackouts, food shortages, and economic privation - these are eloquently told stories about Cuba and the fascinating, yet ordinary Cubans: umemployed drifters, chess players, waitresses, railway workers, homeless vagabonds, and young people caught between the dying Castroera and an uncertain future.

Reviews

"In his first book to be published in the U.S., Ponte gives readers a short collection of six elliptical stories from inside the Cuban revolutionary experience, closer in spirit to the fiction of Eastern European dissidents than to that of Caribbean fabulists. Unlike exiled writers who see the island as either a mythical homeland or a political cause, Ponte paints a picture that will strike the U.S. reader as surreal in its simplicity."--Publisher's Weekly

Ponte raises unease to an art, stripping Cuban spirituality to the bone. His work is so quiet that one can begin to hear the real dynamics, usually just out of reach."--Elizabeth Hanley, Partisan Review

Author Bio

Antonio Jose Ponte was born in 1964 in Matanzas, Cuba, and studied at the University of Havana. He worked for some years as an engineer, and then as a screenwriter. In addition to writing short stories and fiction, Ponte has published prize-winning collections of poetry and essays. His work has been published in France, Germany and Spain. This is his first book to be published in the United States.

Cola Franzen is the translator of over twenty books, including Poems of Arab Andalusia, Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer by Alicia Borinsky and Horses in the Air by Jorge Guillen (recipient of the Academy of American Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award 2000).