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by Ana Menéndez
Adios, Happy Homeland! is a wildly innovative collection of interlinked tales that challenge our preconceptions of storytelling. This critical look at the life of the Cuban writer pulls apart and reassembles the myths that have come to define her culture, blending illusion with reality and exploring themes of art, family, language, superstition, and the overwhelming need to escape - from the island, from memory, from stereotype, and, ultimately, from the self. We're taken into a sick man's fever dream as he waits for a train beneath a strange night sky, into a community of parachute makers facing the end in a windy town that no longer exists, and onto a Cuban beach where the body of a boy last seen on a boat bound for America turns out to be a giant jellyfish.
With Adios Happy Homeland!, Menéndez puts a contemporary twist on the troubled history of Cuba and offers a wry and poignant perspective on the conundrum of cultural displacement. Smart, accessible, and literary, it is a captivating portrayal of how stories are translated, (mis)interpreted, and shaped across time and traditions.
"A collection of linked stories, looks at appearance and reality in the life of a Cuban American writer. Watch it, she's good; especially for your literary readers." - Library Journal
"Part love song to Cuban literature and lore, part Borgesian encyclopedia of the subspecies of flight, part questioning of the very conditions of fiction-making - and all charming." - Kirkus Reviews
"In her fourth book... Menéndez brings schizophrenic bravado to an ostensible anthology of fictional Cuban poets and writers..." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Adios, Happy Homeland! was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ana Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled to Los Angeles in the 1960s and married a few months after meeting at a Cuban social club in Glendale. Menéndez worked as a journalist for six years, first at The Miami Herald, where she covered Little Havana, and later with The Orange County Register in California. She is a graduate of NYU's creative writing program, where she was a New York Times fellow. She is the author of three other books, Loving Che, The Last War, and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, which has been translated into eleven languages. Visit her online at www.anamenendezonline.com.
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The less we know, the longer our explanations.
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