Finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction!
Longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and The Story Prize!
Included in The Rumpus's What to Read When You've Made it More Than
Halfway Through 2017
Selected as one of Rigoberto Gonzalez's Favorite Books of 2017/Critics
Pick, LA Times Jacket Copy
One of Electric Literature's Best Short Story Collections of
2017
Questions of personal and national identity percolate through the
stories in Obejas's memorable short fiction collection, most of which is
set in Cuba, the author's birthplace...These 10 stories show Obejas's
talent, illuminating Cuban culture and the innermost lives of her
characters.
--Publishers Weekly
By turns searing and subtly magical, the stories in Obejas' vividly
imagined collection are propelled by her characters' contradictory
feelings about and unnerving experiences in Cuba...For all the human
tumult and deftly sketched and reverberating historical and cultural
contexts that Obejas incisively creates in these poignant, alarming
tales, she also offers lyrical musings on the mysteries of the sea and
the vulnerability of islands and the body. Obejas' plots are ambushing,
her characters startling, her metaphors fresh, her humor caustic, and
her compassion potent in these intricate and haunting stories of
displacement, loss, stoicism, and realization.
--Booklist
Obejas's stories demonstrate an acute understanding of being caught
between two places and cultures as different as America and Cuba.
--Library Journal
Achy Obejas's collection is about fictional Cuban migrants who never
quite escape the land they've left.
--Electric Literature
Obejas writes with gentleness, without flashy wording or gimmicks, about
people trying to figure out where they belong...The language we use and
the stories we tell impact the futures we can imagine, but they are also
restricted by what has come before. Obejas's Cuban characters, like most
Americans, have limited access to the resources they need. One gets the
sense that Obejas, like the Maldivian president, thinks it is time that
the world takes these systemic problems on.
--Los Angeles Review of Books
Achy Obejas' superb story collection The Tower of Antilles deals with
the conflicted relationships Cubans, exiles and Cuban Americans have
with their homeland.
--LA Times Jacket Copy
The Cubans in Achy Obejas's story collection are haunted by islands: the
island they fled, the island they've created, the island they were taken
to or forced from, the island they long for, the island they return to,
and the island that can never be home again.
In Superman, several possible story lines emerge about a 1950s Havana
sex-show superstar who disappeared as soon as the revolution triumphed.
North/South portrays a migrant family trying to cope with separation,
lives on different hemispheres, and the eventual disintegration of blood
ties. The Cola of Oblivion follows the path of a young woman who returns
to Cuba, and who inadvertently uncorks a history of accommodation and
betrayal among the family members who stayed behind during the
revolution. In the title story, The Tower of the Antilles, an
interrogation reveals a series of fantasies about escape and a history
of futility.
With language that is both generous and sensual, Obejas writes about
existences beset by events beyond individual control, and poignantly
captures how history and fate intrude on even the most ordinary of
lives.
