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Please contact Barbara DeSantis, 323-782-3854
NOW IN PRINT
A novel of existential terror, from a literary master
Translation from Spanish by David Landau
Hardcover, 192 pages, ISBN 0-9714366-4-9, $25.00
A 39-year-old man in Miami gets a letter from his dying father in Cuba,
telling him he has a half-brother living nearby. The search that follows
exposes the madness and terror of life in exile. Carlos Victoria’s novel
in Spanish, Puente en la oscuridad, won the important Letras de Oro prize
for 1993. A Bridge in Darkness, the new edition by Pureplay Press, offers
an intimate picture of an environment scarcely accessible to English-language
readers: the world of the Cuban exile. It also represents the first substantial
appearance in English of a writer widely recognized as a master storyteller.
“He found an affinity with existentialist writers at a time when such
writers were not being read in Cuba, and when ‘magic realism’ was triumphant
in Latin America. His characters have a feeling of foreignness in their
own country, a desolate and anguished viewpoint before an unreal reality,
and they are in search of something that might give them a sense they are
human—as in the works of Albert Camus, for example.”
—Olga Connor, “The Three Victories of Carlos Victoria,”
El Nuevo Herald,
November 7, 2004
About the Author
Born in 1950, Carlos Victoria is a native of Camagüey, central
Cuba. At age fifteen he won a national literary prize, thereby attracting
notice from Fidel Castro’s regime. Despite a wish to keep free of politics,
he was marked as a dissident and later expelled from Havana University
on grounds of “ideological deviation.” In 1978, police arrested him and
confiscated his manuscripts. In 1980 he grabbed the chance to emigrate
to the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift. He now lives in Miami, where he
works as an editor at the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Nuevo Herald.
Through a succession of novels and short-story collections published
in exile, Carlos Victoria has become one of the most honored of Cuba’s
writers and a favorite of Spanish-language audiences across the world.
He has also been widely read in France, where two of his novels have appeared
in translation. His literary début in English is a much-awaited
event.
Pureplay Press, a Los Angeles-based publisher, is dedicated to Cuba’s
history and culture.
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