Download or read book Before Night Falls written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Before Night Falls written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Any attempt to reckon with Cuba's torturous twentieth century will have to take into account Arenas's monumental work ... an essential human testimony, joyful and enraged, a triumph of conscience." -- Garth Greenwell The acclaimed memoir of queer 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 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.

Download or read book Before Night Falls written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinaldo Arenas was born to a poverty-stricken family in rural Cuba. By the time of his death in New York four decades later, he had become one of Cuba's most important poets, an outspoken critic of Castro's regime and one of the leading gay voices of the twentieth century. In Before Night Falls, Arenas tells of his odyssey from young rebel fighting for the Revolution, through his suppression as a writer, his disillusionment with Castro, his imprisonment and torture, to his eventual exile from Cuba to New York, where in 1987 he was diagnosed with AIDS. He committed suicide in 1990, ending a life of constant struggle against repression. In a farewell note, Arenas wrote: Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression that causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life ... I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat, but of continued struggle and hope. Cuba will be free. I already am. (signed) Reinaldo Arenas

Download or read book Before Night Falls written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by . This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinaldo Arenas was born to a poverty-stricken family in rural Cuba. By the time of his death in New York four decades later, he had become one of Cuba's most important poets, an outspoken critic of Castro's regime and one of the leading gay voices of the twentieth century. In Before Night Falls, Arenas tells of his odyssey from young rebel fighting for the Revolution, through his suppression as a writer, his disillusionment with Castro, his imprisonment and torture, to his eventual exile from Cuba to New York, where in 1987 he was diagnosed with AIDS. He committed suicide in 1990, ending a life of constant struggle against repression. In a farewell note, Arenas wrote: Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression that causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life ... I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat, but of continued struggle and hope.Cuba will be free. I already am.(signed)Reinaldo Arenas

Download or read book Singing from the Well written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1988-06-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mona and Other Tales written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Assault written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-06-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the final volume in the series of five novels that constitute his "secret history of Cuba", Reinaldo Arenas paints a harrowing, and at times boldly entertaining, Kafka-esque picture of a dehumanized people living in a world where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death and a cockroach hunt makes for a national holiday. Narrated by a hate-filled government torturer who has become an agent for the "Bureau of Counterwhispering"," The Assault follows his travels through a blackly humorous shadowland as he winnow out whisperers, sexual deviants, and dissidents of every sort--until memory has been banished and spoken language has been nearly forgotten.

Download or read book I Was Cuba written by Ramiro Fernández and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, this work takes a look at Cuban history seen through the collection of Ramiro Fernandez, the world's largest archive of Cuban photos and ephemera.

Download or read book Old Rosa written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A terrifying and beautiful novel, Old Rosa is composed of two stories that converge on a single charged point in the lives of a Cuban mother and son. In the first, the mother finds her son in bed with another boy; in the second, the son is imprisoned in one of Castro's camps for homosexuals.

Download or read book The Doorman written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Gay Cuban Nation written by Emilio Bejel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban Revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, he maps out a fascinating argument about the way in which nationalism and other institutions of power struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as José Martí, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Carlos Montenegro, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Achy Obejas, Sonia Rivera-Valdés, and Reinaldo Arenas, Gay Cuban Nation shows ultimately that the specter of homosexuality is always lurking in the shadows of nationalist discourse.

Download or read book The Color of Summer Or The New Garden of Earthly Delights written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 2000 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Palace of the White Skunks written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1990 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Story of Fortunato, a dreamy, sullen boy trapped in a house full of abandoned aunts in a decrepit backwater. Tormented by sexual desires for both men and women, he hears, in the pauses in his family's quarrels, the crackle of rebel gunfire a sound that will beckon him into a world as demented as the one he has sworn to escape."--Page 4 of cover

Download or read book The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas written by Sandro R. Barros and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Biography (English) American Educational Research Association, Division B: Curriculum Studies, Outstanding Book Award Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, this book demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future. Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics. Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Download or read book The Halfway House written by Guillermo Rosales and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cuban exile William Figueras, a thirty-eight-year-old writer suffering from schizophrenia, is sent to a shabby boarding home for the mentally ill in Miami.

Download or read book Eminent Maricones written by Jaime Manrique and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1999-06-10 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jaime Manrique weaves into his own memoir the lives of three important twentieth-century Hispanic writers: the Argentine Manuel Puig, author of Kiss of the Spider Woman; the Cuban Reinaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls; and Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. Manrique celebrates the lives of these heroic writers who were made outcasts for both their homosexuality and their politics. "Manrique's double vision yields insights into Puig, Arenas, and Lorca unavailable to a writer less attuned to the complex interplay of culture and sexuality, as well as that of race and class in Latino and Anglo societies."—George DeStefano, The Nation "A splendid memoir of Manuel Puig. It evokes him—how he really was—better than anything I've read."—Susan Sontag "Where Manrique's tale differs from others is in its unabashed and sensitive treatment of sexuality. One reads his autobiographical account with pleasure and fascination."—Jose Quiroga, George Washington University "Manrique's voice is wise, brave, and wholly original. This chronicle of self-discovery and literary encounters is heartening and deep."—Kennedy Fraser "In this charmingly indiscreet memoir, Jaime Manrique writes with his customary humor and warm sympathy, engaging our delighted interest on every page. He has the rare gift of invoking and inviting intimacy, in this case a triangulated intimacy between himself, his readers, and his memories. These are rich double portraits."—Phillip Lopate

Download or read book Hallucinations written by Reinaldo Arenas and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1976 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: