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'Newcomer' opens an uncanny window to the hopes and struggles of newly-arrived immigrants in the United States. With a language that combines humor and wit, Manuel Ballagas looks back at his first years in America, and reflects on all the hard work it took him to succeed as a journalist.

Franz Kafka meets Raymond Chandler for a good laugh in The Grave Robber, a provoking book of short fiction bringing you a blend of humor, mystery and, at times, the truly macabre. A definite page-turner you will not put down.

Published posthumously in Havana, the Obra Poetica de Emilio Ballagas was out of print for fifty-seven years. It is the most comprehensive collection of the works of one of Cuba's -and Latin America's- greatest poets, including scattered verse not published in book form during the author's life. Since then, only a few spurious collections of Ballagas' poetry have been published both in the island and abroad. This edition is not only true to the original Obra Poetica but the only one authorized by the late poet's estate. The back cover features a never before published photo of Ballagas in Paris, during the 30s. The preface and selection are the work of the poet's son, Manuel Ballagas.

Horror and the bizarre abound in this book of short fiction by Manuel Ballagas, one of the best Cuban-American writers of our time.

Someone experiences a sex change on a round trip to Havana. Somebody else switches passports, never to return. Yet one more visits his former home in Cuba and bumps into a peculiar tenant. The stories in Malas lenguas are the narrative of the comings and goings of a never ending, banal exile, threaded with the salt of rotten memories.

¿Quién mató a Virgilio Piñera, padre del teatro moderno cubano? ¿Un simple ataque cardiaco o la Seguridad del Estado? ¿O fueron la indeferencia y la complicidad de sus colegas aterrorizados? En Pájaro de Cuenta, el autor ofrece una versión alterna de los penúltimos días de Piñera -o alguien que se llama como él-, en que la ficción se mezcla con la realidad -y muchas veces la suplanta- para arrojar nueva luz sobre el llamado Quinquenio Gris, uno de los períodos más siniestros de la vida cubana bajo el régimen de Fidel Castro.

Meet Manny, a character you will never forget. He's a perennial refugee in La Saguesera, Little Havana's hottest spot, and his adventures are as deadly as funny. It seems that he will only rest when he dies.

Ismael Lorenzo, Tres Novelas: La Hosteria del Tesoro, Alicia en las mil y una camas, La Ciudad Maravillosa.En La Hosterma del Tesoro, la atmssfera de pesadilla que reina en una peculiar isla se ve reflejada de un modo efectivo, y trasladada a un ambiente de oeste norteamericano, con juegos, tiras csmicas y pelmculas de segunda categorma para niqosprecoces o de inclinaciones sadistas.Alicia en las mil y una camas, refleja de una manera dramatica y poitica de como el totalitarismo corrompe y elimina hasta nuestros mas preciados mitos infantiles.En La Ciudad Maravillosa, Lorenzo, con un estilo sencillo y directo, pero eficaz y vigoroso, crea un universo de pesadilla, con personajes extramdos de los comics y la cultura popular, que tiende un puente entre la novela polmtica y la novela fantastica.

¿Es el autor el protagonista de las pesadillas que relata? ¿En qué otra ciudad deberá batallar con sus fantasmas? El lector tiene la última palabra.

"Underpinned by post-colonial theory, the study traces the specter of universalism as it is articulated in the Afro-Hispanic cultural production of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean from the colonial period up until the 1950s. Since the negristas perceived Afro-Caribbean particularity as deviation, universalism amounts to the inherited colonial discourse sustained by an elitist literary establishment and related cultural institution. The central twentieth-century poets under study are the white-identified Creole poets Emilio Ballagas, Luis Palés Matos, and Manuel Del Cabral, respectively, from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The representation of another poet, the nineteenth-century Cuban bard Plácido, provides the ground work for analyzing the colonialist discourse that informs the neocolonialist discourse in which negrista practice flourished. In the first chapter, the criterion for Plácido's initial canonization is shown to be contingent upon a Eurocentric perspective imbued with white supremacy, which encouraged the erasure of Plácido's blackness. In the second chapter, two negrista poetry anthologies, one by Emilio Ballagas and the other by Ramn̤ Guirao, are revisited and deconstructed in order to examine the lack of a decolonizing thrust. In the third chapter, cover illustrations and prints related to the negrista poetry collections of the aforementioned twentieth-century poets are analyzed to derive a grammar that is then applied to the canonized negrista poetry of the white-identified Creole poets. The binary comes across as an effective rhetorical device for neocolonialist discourse. In the last chapter, the Universal Ideal of Man is shown to emerge as the central concern in the latter poetry of Ballagas, Palés Matos, and Del Cabral. In fact, the legacy of white supremacy from the racially-stratified, Spanish-speaking Caribbean of the colonial era informs the trajectory and poetics of these negristas. Throughout the study, specific texts of the 1930s and 40s provide evidence that José Martí's image reigned as the "official" representative of the Universal Ideal of Man in Cuba"--Abstract.