| The Halfway House Contributor(s): Rosales, Guillermo (Author), Kushner, Anna (Translator), Prieto, José Manuel (Introduction by) |
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ISBN: 0811218023 ISBN-13: 9780811218023 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $13.46 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2009 Annotation: A halfway house is ostensibly a refuge for the mentally ill and those abandoned to poverty by their respective families. However, Rosales writes about a particular house - ruled by an abusive supervisor who sees the house as his personal kingdom and occasionally uses its residents for his sexual pleasures. The central characters are a Cuban American man in his thirties and his equally mentally unstable love, a young woman in her twenties, who try to flee the halfway house. Saddled down by his books and her numerous belongings, they only manage to get far enough away for a taste of real freedom. Sad, tender, and dark, "The Halfway House" introduces an important Cuban writer to American readers. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary |
| Dewey: FIC |
| LCCN: 2009005947 |
| Physical Information: 0.4" H x 5.1" W x 7.8" (0.30 lbs) 144 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Never before available in English, The Halfway House is a trip to the darkest corners of the human condition. Humiliations, filth, stench, and physical abuse comprise the asphyxiating atmosphere of a halfway house for indigents in Miami where, in a shaken mental state, the writer William Figueras lives after his exile from Cuba. He claims to have gone crazy after the Cuban government judged his first novel "morose, pornographic, and also irreverent, because it dealt harshly with the Communist Party," and prohibited its publication. By the time he arrives in Miami twenty years later, he is a "toothless, skinny, frightened guy who had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward that very day" instead of the ready-for-success exile his relatives expected to welcome and receive among them. Placed in a halfway house, with its trapped bestial inhabitants and abusive overseers, he enters a hell. Romance appears in the form of Frances, a mentally fragile woman and an angel, with whom he tries to escape in this apocalyptic classic of Cuban literature. "Behind the hardly one hundred pages," Canarias Diario stated, "is the work of a tireless fabulist, a writer who delights in language, extracting verbs and adjectives which are powerful enough to stop the reader in his tracks." |
Contributor Bio(s): Kushner, Anna: - Anna Kushner was born in Philadelphia and first traveled to Cuba in 1999. Beside her "commanding translation" (Words Without Borders) of The Halfway House (ND, 2009), her writing and translations have appeared in numerous other print and web publications.Rosales, Guillermo: - "Guillermo Rosales (b. Cuba 1946 - d. Miami, 1993) grew up in revolutionary Cuba where his father served in Cuba's diplomatic corps. He became a journalist and then a promising novelist. Yet, his work was denounced as "morose, pornographic, and irreverent" by the Communist Party, which led to his first nervous breakdown. Forced to leave the country for Miami, he suffered from schizophrenia, was in and out of psychiatric wards, then tragically, after destroying most of his unpublished manuscripts, shot himself at age 47." |
