Category Archives: Cuba

Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien

October 16, 2013 This week saw the passing of Oscar Hijuelos: guitar-playing, cake-loving (I suspect), also lover of bountiful, sometimes over-stuffed prose. His father was the morning-to-lunch shift cook at the Biltmore Hotel, so he definitely knew a thing or … Continue reading

Posted in Caribbean literature, Cities, Contemporary novel, Cuba, Diaspora, Food in literature, Latin America, Latino/a literature, Music | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Amiri Baraka: jazz side of the brain

July 18, 2013 I’ve always loved this account of jazz from Amiri Baraka: “Jazz enabled separate and valid emotional expressions to be made that were based on older traditions of Afro-American music that were clearly not not a part of … Continue reading

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Mangoes: Richard Blanco, Sandra Cisneros

January 9, 2013 Conceived in Cuba, born in Spain, raised and educated in Miami– that’s Richard Blanco, as described by the inaugural planners. What poem would he be reciting on January 20? It’s not so easy to guess based on … Continue reading

Posted in Americas, Cities, Contemporary literature, Cuba, Diaspora, Ethnicity, Food in literature, Global South, Latino/a literature, Poetry, Spanglish, Vernacular dialects | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spanish Civil War: Hughes and Hemingway

July 4, 2012 The Beinecke Library doesn’t have a great Hemingway Collection (most of his material is at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston), but I did find a rare photo, taken in Madrid in 1937, Hemingway with Langston Hughes, … Continue reading

Posted in Africa, African-American literature, Arabic, Caribbean literature, collaboration, Cuba, Cuban poetry, Ethnicity, Global South, Islam, Latin America, Letters, Libraries, Modernist poetry, Newspapers, peripheral networks, Spanish, Translation, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hemingway’s Four Wives

June 27, 2012 Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Matha Gellhorn, Mary Welsh — I sometimes think of them as punctuation marks to the writing.  And yet a good chunk of world history seems written into these marriages. Hadley was in Paris … Continue reading

Posted in Americas, Caribbean literature, Cities, Cuba, Global South, Latin America, museums, Nobel Prize, Spanish, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Wallace Stevens, amigo of Cuban writers

April 18, 2012 Wallace Stevens and Cristina García?   Not the most obvious pairing.  Yet it is Stevens’s poems that remained on García’s desk throughout the writing of Dreaming in Cuban, giving the novel its epigraph. And for Stevens, Havana is … Continue reading

Posted in Caribbean literature, Comparative literature, Cuba, Global South, Latin America, Letters, Modernist poetry, peripheral networks, Spanish, Translation, Twentieth century literature, Universities, world literature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments