Very little is known about how an unknown writer like Guillermo Rosales came to be the writer of excellence who appears here, the possessor of a unique style and the author of what is, without a doubt, one of the best Cuban novels of the second half of the twentieth century, comparable only to the mythical Carlos Montenegro’s Men Without Women or Reinaldo Arenas’s famous memoir Before Night Falls.

Jose Manuel Prieto

The Halfway House, a novel by the great Guillermo Rosales, is a heart-breaking classic of modern Cuban literature.

Included in the Available Titles catalog

The Halfway House

by Guillermo Rosales

Translated from Spanish by Anna Kushner

Never before available in English, The Halfway House is a trip to the darkest corners of the human condition. Humiliations, filth, stench, and physical abuse comprise the asphyxiating atmosphere of a halfway house for indigents in Miami where, in a shaken mental state, the writer William Figueras lives after his exile from Cuba. He claims to have gone crazy after the Cuban government judged his first novel “morose, pornographic, and also irreverent, because it dealt harshly with the Communist Party,” and prohibited its publication. By the time he arrives in Miami twenty years later, he is a “toothless, skinny, frightened guy who had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward that very day” instead of the ready-for-success exile his relatives expected to welcome and receive among them. Placed in a halfway house, with its trapped bestial inhabitants and abusive overseers, he enters a hell. Romance appears in the form of Frances, a mentally fragile woman and an angel, with whom he tries to escape in this apocalyptic classic of Cuban literature. “Behind the hardly one hundred pages,” Canarias Diario stated, “is the work of a tireless fabulist, a writer who delights in language, extracting verbs and adjectives which are powerful enough to stop the reader in his tracks.”

Paperback(published May, 01 2009)

ISBN
9780811218023
Price US
14.95
Price CN
19
Trim Size
5x7
Page Count
144

Ebook(published May, 01 2009)

ISBN
9780811223263
Page Count
144
Portrait of Guillermo Rosales

Guillermo Rosales

20th century Cuban novelist

Very little is known about how an unknown writer like Guillermo Rosales came to be the writer of excellence who appears here, the possessor of a unique style and the author of what is, without a doubt, one of the best Cuban novels of the second half of the twentieth century, comparable only to the mythical Carlos Montenegro’s Men Without Women or Reinaldo Arenas’s famous memoir Before Night Falls.

Jose Manuel Prieto

This posthumous translation of Rosales, a Cuban-American writer who committed suicide in 1993, delivers a raw, powerful story set in a Miami home for the mentally ill…. It’s a frightening, nihilistic cousin of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Publisher's Weekly (starred review)