Dream with No Name: Contemporary Fiction from Cuba »

Juana Ponce de Leon is a writer, literary critic, and editor. She served as editor of LS, the literary supplement of the Advocate-Weekly newspapers in Connecticut and Massachusetts and now serves on the literature panel for New York Council on the Arts. Her articles have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, and Latina.

Comprising a literary map of the moral and aesthetic geography of Cuba, this volume includes stories by Marya Montero, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Olivares Baro, Pablo Armando Fernandez, and other writers, both new and well-known.

Library Journal

This welcome anthology of 19 contemporary short stories includes some famous names--Reinaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier--as well as many new to non-Spanish readers. The collection covers the periods before and after the revolution, includes expatriate as well as island writers, and demonstrates Cuba's new acceptance of previously censored subjects--e.g., gay and lesbian love, drugs, and social criticism. Angel Santiesteban Prats's "13th Parallel South" chronicles the aimlessness of young Cuban soldiers in Angola. The title character of Leonardo Padura Fuentes's "The Hunter" prowls Havana's gay scene in search of lost love. In Arturo Arango's Kafkaesque "The Waiting Room," a miniature republic is founded as passengers, waiting two months for a bus that never comes, form an executive committee to distribute food and justice and establish a nighttime free zone to keep sex away from the children. Appropriate for larger collections.--Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., McMinnville, OR Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.