"If baseball is really a metaphor for life, then Kill the Ámpaya -- Dick
Cluster's wonderful collection of Latin American baseball stories -- is
an astonishing record of its beauty and coarseness, redemption and
tragedy. You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate these
stories, each one hinged on baseball directly or indirectly, and delight
in this reading."--Achy Obejas, author of The Tower of Antilles and
Other Stories
These are stories we have lived. . . Some are funny, some cruel or
violent, but in the end they are part of our culture that makes us act
the way we do. They make me think of the millions of stories that got
lost behind us. --Omar Vizquel, from Venezuela, one of baseball's
all-time best fielding shortstops who played for the Seattle Mariners,
Cleveland Indians, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, Chicago White
Sox, and Toronto Blue Jays.
Baseball is in the soul of millions in Puerto Rico and the other
countries that play the game with a Latino flair. These stories are
portraits of its place in our lives. --Benjie Molina, former Texas
Rangers catcher and first base coach.
A rich variety of baseball fiction exists south of the Florida Straits
and the Rio Grande, but almost none available in English. This
collection translates for the first time stories ranging from the highly
literary to the vernacular. These inventive and entertaining stories
reveal the place of baseball in Latin America. Mixing fan and fandom,
baseball and politics, rural and urban life, sexism and poverty, Kill
the Ampaya! reveals how baseball shapes the social fabric of everyday
Latin American life.
The collection includes well known writers such as Leonardo Padura from
Cuba (The Man Who Loved Dogs), Sergio Ramírez from Nicaragua (Divine
Punishment, A Thousand Deaths Plus One). Others are well known
writers in their home countries such as Arturo Arango and Eduardo del
Llano in Cuba, Alexis Gómez Rosa and José Bobadilla in the Dominican
Republic, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro in Puerto Rico, Vicente Leñero in
Mexico as well as emerging literary figures such as Salvador Fleján and
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón in Venezuela, Sandra Tavarez and Daniel Reyes
Germán in the D.R., Carmen Hernández Peña in Cuba.
