Before Night Falls

Before Night Falls PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143134841
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The acclaimed memoir of homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas chronicling his tumultuous yet luminary life, from his impoverished upbringing in Cuba to his imprisonment at the hands of a Communist regime. A Penguin Vitae Edition The astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels. Penguin Classics launches a new hardcover series with five American classics that are relevant and timeless in their power, and part of a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from almost seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

Before Night Falls

Before Night Falls PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143134841
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
The acclaimed memoir of homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas chronicling his tumultuous yet luminary life, from his impoverished upbringing in Cuba to his imprisonment at the hands of a Communist regime. A Penguin Vitae Edition The astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels. Penguin Classics launches a new hardcover series with five American classics that are relevant and timeless in their power, and part of a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from almost seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

Farewell to the Sea

Farewell to the Sea PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN: 9780670529605
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Twice confiscated by Cuban authorities and rewritten from memory, this litany of despair--the story of life in totalitarian Cuba--is told through the voice of a wife (who remains nameless), then through that of her husband, Hector, a disenchanted revolutionary and poet. Hector, his wife and baby vacation for six days at a small seaside cabin. There, in feverish lyrical outbursts, they each lament the loss of the freedom they had barely begun to know in early Castro years, and with its passing the loss of everything else--enthusiasm, rebelliousness and hope. Nothing except terror remains, and as it grows, Hector and his wife's relationship becomes intolerable. Under the domestic idle chatter lie their complete solitudes, a vestige of wilted love, her disgust at the messier aspects of child care, his silent fury and homosexual desire.--From publisher description.

The Doorman

The Doorman PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802134059
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Arenas's first work set in the United States breaks new ground with the story of a young Cuban refugee who becomes a doorman at a luxury apartment building. Oddly alienated from the tenants, he is seduced by their pets, who are determined to revolt against humans and human society.

Singing from the Well

Singing from the Well PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014009444X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions. The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's "secret history of Cuba," a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and breathtakingly lyrical. In the end, it is a stunning depiction of a childhood besieged by horror--and a moving defense of liberty and the imagination in a world of barbarity, persecution, and ignorance.

The Assault

The Assault PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
A surrealistic novel on a dictatorship, a Cuban version of George Orwell's 1984. The protagonist is a counter-whispering agent whose task is to ferret out people spreading rumors inimical to the regime. By the author Before Night Falls.

Mona and Other Tales

Mona and Other Tales PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426920
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Mona and Other Tales covers Reinaldo Arenas's entire career: his recently rediscovered debut (which got him a job at the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana), stories written in a political prison, and some of his last works, written in exile. Many of the stories have not previously appeared in English. Here is the tender story of a boy who recognizes evil for the first time and decides to ignore it; the tale of a writer struggling between the demands of creativity and of fame; common people dealing with changes brought about by revolution and exile; a romp with a famous, dangerous woman in the Metropolitan Museum; an outrageous fantasy that picks up where Garcia Lorca's famous play The House of Bernardo Alba ends. Told with Arenas's famous wit and humanity, Mona makes a perfect introduction to this important writer. Translated from the Spanish by Dolores Koch.

The Color of Summer, Or, The New Garden of Earthly Delights

The Color of Summer, Or, The New Garden of Earthly Delights PDF Author: Reinaldo Arenas
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Arenas's finest comic achievement is also the fulfillment of his life's work, the Pentagonia, a five-volume cycle of autobiographical novels he began writing in his early twenties. Although it is the penultimate installment in his "secret history of Cuba," it was, in fact, the last book Arenas wrote before his death in 1990. A tale of survival by wits and wit, this is ultimately a powerful and passionate story about the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of political and sexual repression.--From publisher description.

Eminent Maricones

Eminent Maricones PDF Author: Jaime Manrique
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299161842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
One of the leading Latino writers working today offers a provocative autobiography interweaving his own story with the lives of three other gay Hispanic authors: Manuel Puig, Reinaldo Arenas, and Federico Garcia Lorca.

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas PDF Author: Jorge Olivares
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822397587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Becoming Reinaldo Arenas explores the life and work of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), who emerged on the Latin American cultural scene in the 1960s and quickly achieved literary fame. Yet as a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas also experienced discrimination and persecution; he produced much of his work amid political controversy and precarious living conditions. In 1980, having survived ostracism and incarceration in Cuba, he arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift. Ten years later, after struggling with poverty and AIDS in New York, Arenas committed suicide. Through insightful close readings of a selection of Arenas's works, including unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, Olivares examines the writer's personal, political, and artistic trajectory, focusing on his portrayals of family, sexuality, exile, and nostalgia. He documents Arenas's critical engagement with cultural and political developments in revolutionary Cuba and investigates the ways in which Arenas challenged literary and national norms. Olivares's analysis shows how Arenas drew on his life experiences to offer revealing perspectives on the Cuban Revolution, the struggles of Cuban exiles, and the politics of sexuality.

Animacies

Animacies PDF Author: Mel Y. Chen
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822352729
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness