Departing from both the utopian-political and the romantic-baroquestyles of past Cuban literature, Ponte deftly sketches a picture of acontemporary Cuba that is very different from the stereotype ofCaribbean life, full of music and dance and colorful celebration. An oldman and a six-year-old prodigy have a rendezvous to play chess at aforlorn railroad station. Randomly riding trains, a woman keeps companywith a strange assembly of men. An unemployed historian falls in lovewith an enigmatic astrologer, and the two live out their tragedy in thestreets of Havana as homeless vagrants. A father and son take an aimlessstroll after lunch to see the whores along the Malecón, Havana's seasidepromenade. A young man, one of the last Cuban students to go to theSoviet Union on a foreign-study program, returns to Havana, where heexplores his identity-looking at childhood photos with his grandfather,spending time with old friends, and obsessively seeking news of a womanhe had known and loved in Russia.In a style both lucid and translucent, Ponte shapes intricate storiesof self-discovery and metaphysical revelation in spare and allusiveprose.About The AuthorsAntonio José Ponte was born in 1964 in Matanzas, Cuba, and studied atthe University of Havana. He worked for some years as an engineer, andthen as a screenwriter. In addition to writing short stories andfiction, Ponte has published prize-winning collections of poetry andessays. His work has been published in France, Germany, and Spain.This is his first book to be published in the United States.Cola Franzen is the translator of over twenty books, including Poems ofArab Andalusia, Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer by Alicia Borinsky, andHorses in the Air by Jorge Guillén (recipient of the Academy ofAmerican Poets Harold Morton Landon Translation Award 2000).Dick Cluster, author of Obligations of the Bone and other fiction, hastranslated (with Cindy Schuster) Mirta Yáñez's Cubana: ContemporaryFiction by Cuban Women, and The Cuban Mile by Alejandro Hernández Díaz.