The Book of Havana

by Daniel Chavarria, Irina J. Davidenko, Eduardo del Llano, Ahmel Echevarría Peré, Jorge Enrique Lage, Laidi Fernández de Juan, Eduardo Heras León, Cinthia R. Paredes, Francisco López Sacha , Eduardo Angel Santiesteban

2018 · Comma Press

When a history teacher decides to throw out an old, threadbare Cuban flag, he doesn’t plan for the air of suspicion that quickly descends on him… A woman’s attempt to register ownership of her family home draws her into a bureaucratic labyrinth that requires a grasp of higher mathematics to fully comprehend… On the day of their graduation, a group of students spend the night drinking around the ‘Fountain of Youth’, ironically celebrating the bright future that doesn’t await them… The stories gathered in this anthology reflect the many complex challenges Havana’s citizens have had to endure as a result of their country’s political isolation – from the hardships of the ‘Special Period’, to the pitfalls of Cuba’s schizophrenic currency system, to the indignities of becoming a cheap tourist destination for well-heeled Westerners. Moving through various moments in its recent history, as well as through different neighbourhoods – from the prefab, Soviet-era maze of Alamar, to the bars and nightclubs of the Malecón and Vedado – these stories also demonstrate the defiance of Havana: surviving decades of economic disappointment with a flair for the comic, the surreal and the fantastical that remains as fresh as the first dreams of revolution. Translated from the Spanish by Orsola Casagrande and Séamas Carraher.

The American Way

by Talal Abu Shawish, Najwa Bin Shatwan, Hassan Blasim, Paige Cooper, Lina Meruane, Fariba Nawa, Jacob Ross, Bina Shah, Kim Thúy, Carol Zardetto, Gianfranco Bettin, Gioconda Belli, Gabriel Ángel, Ahmel Echevarría Peré, Ahmet Haluk Ünal, Hüseyin Karabey, Wilfredo Mármol Amaya, Lidudumalingani, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Payam Nasser

2021 · Comma Press

After four years of Trump, America seems set to return to political normality. But for much of the rest of the world, that normality is a horror story: 75 years of US-led invasions, CIA-sponsored coups, election interference, stay-behind networks, rendition, and weapons testing... all in the name of Pax America, the world’s police. If you are not an ally of the US, in this ‘normality’, your country can find its democratic processes undermined and its economic wellbeing conditioned upon returning to the fold. If you’re not strategically important to the US, you can find yourself its dumping ground. This new anthology re-examines this history with stories that explore the human cost of these interventions on foreign soil, by writers from that soil. From nuclear testing in the Pacific, to human testing of CIA torture tactics, from coups in Latin America, to all-out invasions in the Middle and Far East; the atrocities that follow are often dismissed in history books as inevitable in the ‘fog of war’. By presenting them from indigenous, grassroots perspectives, accompanied by afterwords by the historians that consulted on them, this book attempts to bring some clarity back to that history. Stories are accompanied by afterwords written by historians, providing historical context. Afterwords by: Olmo Golz, Emmanuel Gerard, Felix Julio Alfonso Lopez, David Harper, Ertugrul Kurkcu, Francisco Dominguez, Maurizio Dianese, Julio Barrios Zardetto, Brian Meeks, Victor Figueroa Clark, Raymond Bonner, Daniel Kovalik, Meral Cicek, Ian Shaw, Matteo Capasso, Neil Faulkner, Xuan Phuong, Iyad S. S. Abujaber & Chris Hedges. Translated by: Orsola Casagrande, Mustafa Gundogdu, Sawad Hussain, Jonathan Wright, Basma Ghalayini, Nicholas Glastonbury, Sara Khalili, J. Bret Maney, Adam Feinstein, and Megan McDowell. Part of our History-into-Fiction series.