International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. May's nation is Cuba. We meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore.

To get you started, check out our list of a few award-winning authors with English translations available. The bolded fiction titles are available through your Santa Fe Public Library as books or ebooks (Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby).

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Suggested authors:

Reinaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls, The Ill-fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando and Old Rosa: Two Stories

Old Rosa: Two Stories 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.

Alejo Carpentier, author of The Chase, Explosion in a Cathedral, The Kingdon of the World, The Lost Steps, and The Harp and Shadow

Explosion in a Cathedral is one of Cuba's -- and Latin America's – most well-regarded historical novels, about imperial conquest carried out under the guise of liberation, in its first new English translation in 60 years and featuring a new foreword by Alejandro Zambra. What ensues in Carpentier's swashbuckling, magical realist masterpiece is an explosive clash between the New World and the Old World, and between revolutionary ideals and the corrupting allure of power.

Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban, A Handbook to Luck, King of Cuba, The Lady Matador’s Hotel and Vanishing Maps

The Cuban-born American’s debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, is about three generations of Cuban women and their differing responses to the revolution. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. It was the 65th most-challenged book from 2010-19 in the U.S., according to the American Library Association, for “obscene and/or pornographic material.”

King of Cuba is about an octogenarian Cuban exile obsessively seeking revenge against Fidel Castro. The Lady Matador’s Hotel focuses on the intertwining lives of the denizens of a hotel in an unnamed, troubled Latin American country.

Wendy Guerra, author of Revolution Sunday and Everyone Leaves

The former Cuban TV actress is best known for her novels, catapulting to fame with her blunt story of a woman’s coming of age in Cuba poverty and a dysfunctional family in Everyone Leaves.

As Cuban author Pablo Medina puts it, “She belongs to a generation that experienced firsthand the best and worst the new regime had to offer and has no illusions about the reality it has imposed on the Cuban people—the privations, the lack of individual freedoms, and the failure of its leaders to live up to the reforms they once promised.” 

In Revolution Sunday, the writer-daughter of a Cuban dissident falls in love with an actor making a documentary about her father but soon discovers that neither the actor nor her father are who she thought they were.

Nicolás Guillén, author of Man-making words: selected poems of Nicolás Guillén

Many critics consider him as the most influential of those Latin American poets who dealt with African themes and re-created African song and dance rhythms in literary form.  Man-making words: selected poems of Nicolás Guillén provides examples and context from his landmark work Motivos de son (1930). The work was inspired by the living conditions of Afro-Cubans and the popular son music. It established the importance of Afro-Cuban culture as a valid genre in Cuban literature.

Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, author of My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog

My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a novel told in 15 stories, linked by the same protagonist, the narrator, who-- in her own voice and channeling the voices of others -- creates an unsparing, multigenerational portrait of her native Cuba. Though she feels suffocated by the island and decides to leave, hers is not just a political novel--nor just a queer novel, an immigrant novel, a feminist novel--but a deeply existential one, in which mortality, corporeality, bureaucracy, emotional and physical violence, and the American Dream define the long journey of our narrator and her beloved pet dog, who gives the book both its title and its unforgettable ending.

Dulce Maria Loynaz, appears in anthology Making Face, Making Soul

A collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color. Making Face, Making Soul includes over 70 works by poets, writers, artists, and activists including the Cuban-born Loynaz.

Pablo Medina, author of The Cuban Comedy, The Cigar Roller and The Island Kingdom

In The Cuban Comedy, Piedra Negra is an isolated village, whose citizens consist mainly of soldiers injured in the revolution who pass the time drinking a firewater so intense, all hallucinate, and most never recover. Elena wins a national poetry prize and leaves Piedra Negra behind for Havana where she encounters spies and secret meetings, black marketeers, and censorship. Full of humor and insights into an often kafkaesque regime, Medina brings 1960s Cuba to life through the eyes of Elena.

In The Cigar Roller (e-audiobook), a former cigar-factory worker, is confined in a Florida hospital after a paralyzing stoke. His body no longer works, but his mind is very much alive. One day, the taste of mango on his tongue brings memories flooding back of his life in Havana, including some long-buried facts.

Leonardo Padura, author of the Havana series and Heretics

Padura’s most-acclaimed mystery, Heretics features a down-on-his-luck detective Mario Conde in this work of historical fiction dealing with the Nazi theft of art, the Holocaust, crime in Cuba in 1939 and modern day.  Most of his Havana series is available starting with Havana Red (introduces Conde investigating the murder of a transvestite) and continuing with Havana Black, Havana Blue, Havana Gold and Havana Fever.

Karla Suárez, author of Year Zero

The year is 1993. Cuba is at the height of the Special Period, a widespread economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. For Julia, a mathematics lecturer who hates teaching, this is Year Zero: the lowest possible point. But a way out appears: the search for a missing document that will prove the telephone was invented in Havana, secure her reputation, and give Cuba a purpose once more. What begins as an investigation into scientific history becomes a tangle of sex, friendship, family legacies, and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.

Zoé Valdés, author of A Greek Love, The Weeping Woman and The List of Shipwrecked Books

Winner of the prestigious Azoriń Prize for Fiction, The Weeping Woman is about love, sacrifice, and Picasso's mistress, Dora Maar. A writer resembling Valdés--a Cuban exile living in Paris with her husband and young daughter--is preparing a novel on the life of Dora Maar, one of the most promising artists in the Surrealist movement until she met Pablo Picasso. Dora became his lover, muse, and ultimately, his victim. She became The Weeping Woman captured in his famous portrait, and their affair ended with her commitment to an asylum at the hands of Picasso's friends.

For fans of Isabel Allende, Gabriela Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, A Greek Love (ebook) is the story of a woman who must fight for her love and her child in a Cuba suffocated by oppression.