Poet and novelist Pablo Medina's Cubop City fuses raw, passionate
language, and elegant lyricism to breathe life into a
musically-disguised New York City shaped by jazz masters, refugees, and
storytellers.
Our guide into Cubop City is The Storyteller, born nearly blind and
shrouded in his mother's guilt. He's homeschooled inside his parents'
crumbling apartment with a European housekeeper, and educated through
Encyclopedia Britannica, the Bible, and Arabian Nights. When he's 25,
his mother and father are both diagnosed with cancer, and The
Storyteller alone is left to care for them. He does so by telling them
stories conceived from the prolific reading that allowed his imagination
to flourish despite little contact with the outside world.
Through his tales full of magic, sorrow, longing, and love, Cubop City
surges colorfully to life. Moving through myriad points of view, The
Storyteller imagines a world populated by both well-known figures like
Chano Pozo and Jelly Roll Morton, and invented characters, most notably
a mustachioed man who is stabbed by a stranger and embarks on a
novel-long search for his attacker.
Molded in the cadence of Afro-Cuban jazz, Cubop City is a symphonic
portrait of a bustling urban landscape and the intimate lives that give
a city its voice.
