Calvert Casey: The Collected Stories (Latin America in Translation)

Casey, Calvert

ISBN 10: 082232153X / ISBN 13: 9780822321538

Published by Duke University Press Books, 1998

About this Item

HARDCOVER Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M082232153XZ3

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Calvert Casey: The Collected Stories (Latin America in Translation)
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082232153X
• ISBN 13: 9780822321538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Hailed as a literary relative of Kafka and Poe by his Italian and Cuban contemporaries, Calvert Casey and his enthralling work have until now remained eclipsed in the United States. This collection brings all of Casey’s powerful short stories and a fragment of an unfinished novel to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Exploring the human condition through poetically unique yet torturous views of the mind, Casey was a renegade artist whose work perceives reality as a smoke screen behind which Truth is hidden. He intended his fiction to disturb and subvert standard, plot-driven views of life.
Born in the United States, Casey was raised in Cuba and spent most of his life there and in Europe. He chose Spanish as his primary artistic tongue. A member of the intelligentsia surrounding Castro in the early years of the revolution, he was eventually exiled—and in 1969 committed suicide in Rome at the age of forty-five. Although most of his luminous stories are set in Havana, his is not a touristy, picturesque landscape but an often strange and nightmarish theater of human passions, inhabited by figures—silhouettes, really—that live on the edge of normality. This volume, which showcases Casey’s mastery of the skill of indirect and gradual revelation, is the most complete to appear in any language and includes a biographical and critical introduction written by Ilan Stavans, the noted novelist and scholar of Hispanic culture.
Readers interested in the art of fiction and in the complexities of the human psyche will find Casey’s work irresistible.

About the Author

Calvert Casey (1924–1969) had published both essays and short stories in Spanish during his lifetime. John H. R. Polt is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at the University of California at Berkeley. Ilan Stavans is Professor of Spanish and Creative Writing at Amherst College.

Ilan Stavans is Professor of Spanish and Creative Writing at Amherst College.