Virgil Suarez

Little Havana Blues is a unique anthology comprised of fifty poems, twelve short stories, three plays, and eleven essays. The introduction argues that Cuban-American literature is not new to the 1990s. Because most published works were in Spanish, the emergence of Spanish-English sheds a whole new light on the literature. The "Spanglish" culture reverberates through every single submission.
I have to admit, the oddest story is, "The Defector" by Ricardo Pau-Llosa, a fiction about a talking capybara who lives is a bizarre zoo.
Most interesting quote from "Memories of My Father" by Omar Torres, "I don't know why a woman would want to get married; you're either a housewife, an old maid or a prostitute" (p 363).
I have been reading a lot about Cuba lately. I feel that learning about Cuba's rich and troubled history helped me appreciate the submissions in Little Havana Blues.… (más)

This anthology is one of my favorites, first because of the quality and variety within the work, but beyond that, it focuses on work that is new, much of it by unfamiliar authors. It seems that so many of the anthologies I pick up, even current and mainstream ones like the ones Billy Collins has put together, incorporate far too many works that have appeared in every other anthology already. It's frustrating as a reader (not to mention as someone who writes), to open up an anthology you've gotten and find that perhaps half of the poems are poems you've not only read over and over again, but which already appear on your shelf over and over again in other anthologies. I do enjoy going back to favorites and classics, but how many copies of the Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams staples do you really need? In any case, this anthology avoids the old favorites for the most part while still incorporating some familiar writers. The poems, overall, are striking and written for impact, and there are many here that you'd want to go back to for further readings. In the end, this is probably one of the most worthwhile and shelfworthy anthology I own, for originality certainly, and for quality, it's up there.… (más)