Hoyt Rogers: Sailing to Noon
(with Frank Báez and Artemisia Vento)
In a lush Caribbean setting, Sailing to Noon narrates a zestful, action-packed plot. Chiara marvels at the island of Canuba, where “magic realism” is everyday life. Amado, her pansexual lover, immerses her in its natural wonders and buoyant sensuality. Published in 2023, Sailing to Noon found immediate favor with readers and critics alike. Jonathan Galassi hailed it as “a big performance—the epic myth of Canuba.” Siri Hustvedt praised the book’s “vivid intimacy,” while Edmund White wryly advised: “Put this novel in a tightly sealed drawer; otherwise, it’s so alive it might run away.”
Mario Vargas Llosa: The Feast of the Goat
The Feast of the Goat (Spanish: La Fiesta del Chivo) is a 2000 novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart: during and immediately after the assassination itself, in May 1961; and thirty-five years later, in 1996. Throughout, there is also extensive reflection on the heyday of the dictatorship in the 1950s.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Three Sad Tigers (Three Trapped Tigers)
Three Sad Tigers (in Spanish: Tres tristes tigres) is the debut novel by Cuban expatriate writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. The book was first published in Spain in 1967. It was later translated into English by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine and published in 1971 as Three Trapped Tigers. Full of clever word-play, social satire, and engaging scenes of Havana night-life, it is considered a classic of the Latin American Boom.
Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. A postcolonial and feminist prequel to Jane Eyre, it describes the point-of-view of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Her story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who isolates her from the rest of the world. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the themes of gender, race, Caribbean history, and assimilation. Antoinette confronts a white, patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
José Lezama Lima: Paradiso
Paradiso is a seminal novel of 1966 by Cuban writer José Lezama Lima, the only one completed and published during his lifetime. The Italian title echoes Dante. Highly varied in tone and substance, the book was rendered into English by Gregory Rabassa, the famed translator of García Márquez. Written in an elaborately baroque style, the narrative follows the childhood and youth of José Cemí, and depicts many colorful, scandalous, lyrical, and eccentric scenes which jive with Lezama's own life as a young poet in Havana.
Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana and The Comedians
Our Man in Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the renowned British author Graham Greene. Greene uses the novel to mock intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. The book predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, but certain aspects of the plot, notably the role of missile installations, appear to anticipate the events of 1962.
The Comedians (1966) is Graham Greene’s second Caribbean novel. Set in Haiti under the rule of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his secret police, the Tontons Macoutes, it explores political repression and terrorism through the figure of an English hotel owner, Brown. The story begins as three men, Brown, Smith, an "innocent" American, and Major H. O. Jones, a confidence man, meet on a ship bound for Haiti.
V. S. Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas
A House for Mr Biswas is a 1961 novel by V. S. Naipaul, significant as Naipaul's first work to achieve acclaim worldwide. Set in Trinidad, it is the story of Mohun Biswas, a Hindu Indo-Trinidadian who continually strives for success and mostly fails, who marries into the influential Tulsi family only to find himself dominated by it, and who finally sets the goal of owning his own house. It relies on some biographical elements from the experience of the author's father, and views a colonial world sharply with postcolonial perspectives.
Alejo Carpentier: The Kingdom of This World
The Kingdom of This World (in Spanish: El reino de este mundo) is a novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, published in 1949 in the original Spanish and first translated into English in 1957. A work of historical fiction, it tells the story of Haiti before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture, as seen by its central character, Ti Noel, who serves as the novel's connecting thread. With its unpredictable twists and complex, innovative style, this book heralds the beginning of “magic realism.”
George Lamming: In the Castle of My Skin
In the Castle of My Skin is the first and much acclaimed novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming, originally published in 1953. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by eminent figures Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright. Set in the 1930s–'40s in Carrinccgton Village, Barbados, where the author was born and raised, In the Castle of My Skin follows the events in the life of a young boy named G, which take place against the background of dramatic changes in the society in which he lives.