Cristina García is the author of seven novels, including Dreaming in Cuban (1992), The Agüero Sisters (1997), Monkey Hunting (2003), A Handbook to Luck (2007), The Lady Matador’s Hotel (2010), King of Cuba (2013), and Here in Berlin (2017). García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox, were published in 2008, and a young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, in 2011. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. In 2018, Central Works Theater premiered her theatrical adaptation of King of Cuba, her darkly comic sixth novel. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. García has taught at universities nationwide. She was University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos and Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Dreaming in CubanA Novel
“I want to go where it’s cold,” Lourdes told her husband. They began to drive. “Colder,” she said as they passed the low salt marshes of Georgia, as if the word were a whip driving them north. “Colder,” she said through the withered fields of a Carolina winter. “Colder,” she said again in Washington, D.C., despite the cherry-blossom promises, despite the white stone monuments hoarding winter light. “This is cold enough,” she finally said when they reached New York.
Dreaming in Cuban:A Novel -
Dreaming in CubanA Novel
Felicia tries to shake off her doubts, but all she sees is a country living on slogans and agitation, a people always on the brink of war. She scorns the militant words blaring on billboards everywhere. WE SHALL OVERCOME…AS IN VIETNAM…CHANGE DEFEAT INTO VICTORY…Even the lowly weeds pullers had boasted a belligerent name: The Mechanized Offensive Brigade. Young teachers are Fighters for Leaning. Student working in the fields are the Juvenile Column of the Centenary. Literacy volunteers are The Fatherland or Death Brigade.
Dreaming in Cuban:A Novel -
Dreaming in CubanA Novel
Mamá blindfolded me and handed me a broom. At first I swung wildly, battering Manolo Colón, the smart, shy boy who liked me. He almost ran home, but Mamá wiped his face with a damp rag and gave him a piece from the best part of the cake. Then she blindfolded me again and I whipped the air with the broomstick until the piñata burst open, releasing long, gooey tentacles of raw egg.
Dreaming in Cuban:A Novel
"Darkly hilarious, García braids . . . parallel stories with consummate ease. With a fine balance of wry absurdity and existential poignancy, García builds not just a tale of the end of days but a snapshot of the past impact and future reverberations of Cuba's revolution—a theme more fascinating than ever as the once-isolated island nation opens itself to the world." —Elle magazine [on King of Cuba]
“Pitch-perfect . . . García is still drawn to describe the richness and variety of the immigrant experience . . . [But] she also fixes her attention on the fundamentally human desire to make sense of the world, to impose order on the chaos of nature and to rationalize one’s mysterious place within it.” —Chicago Tribune [on A Handbook to Luck]
“A work that possesses the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though one is dazzled by the book’s small fireworks of imagery, though one stops to marvel at some of the fantastic events that bloom on its pages, the reader is never distracted from the gripping story of its extraordinary heroines and the passions that bind and separate them from one another and the country of their birth . . . [García] is blessed with a poet’s ear for language, a historian’s fascination with the past, and a musician’s intuitive understanding of the ebb and flow of emotion.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times [on Dreaming in Cuban]
Selected Works
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