A terrifying and beautiful novel, Old Rosa 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."

Mona and Other Tales covers Reinaldo Arenas's entire career: his recently rediscovered debut (which got him a job at the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana), stories written in a political prison, and some of his last works, written in exile. Many of the stories have not previously appeared in English.
Here is the tender story of a boy who recognizes evil for the first time and decides to ignore it; the tale of a writer struggling between the demands of creativity and of fame; common people dealing with changes brought about by revolution and exile; a romp with a famous,...

Arenas s first work set in the United States breaks new ground with the story of a young Cuban refugee who becomes a doorman at a luxury apartment building. Oddly alienated from the tenants, he is seduced by their pets, who are determined to revolt against humans and human society."

Reinaldo Arenas is one of the leading Cuban writers of the twentieth century. He was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1943. From 1974 to1976 he was incarcerated in the El Morro prison in Havana. He left Cuba in 1980 via the Mariel Boatlift along with125,000 other Cubans who were opposed to the ruling regime in Cuba. He settled in New York where he obtained the Cintas and Guggenheim fellowships, as well as the award for best foreign novelist published in France in 1989. On Friday, December 7, 1990, he ended his life. In a letter sent to the Horacio Aguirre, director of the Spanish newspaper Diario...

His mother talks piously of the heaven that awaits the good, and disciplines him with an ox prod. His grandmother burns his precious crosses for kindling. His cousins meet to plot their grandfather's death. Yet in the hills surrounding his home, another reality exists, a place where his mother wears flowers in her hair, and his cousin Celestino, a poet who inscribes verse on the trunks of trees, understands his visions.

The first novel in Reinaldo Arenas's -secret history of Cuba, - a quintet he called the Pentagonia, Singing from the Well is by turns explosively crude and...

A passionate, epic writer, the author of Before Night Falls, concludes his five-novel sequence--a "secret history of Cuba" and a writer's autobiography--with this allegorical satire. Arenas paints a harrowing yet boldly entertaining Kafka-esque picture of a dehumanized people and the despair of an observer/narrator clinging to sanity.

The shocking memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks...