Read Around North America Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in North America.
Best books from North America (2032)
401.
La carne de René by Virgilio Piñera ES
Country: North America / 
Cuba
Cuba
Description:
René tiene 20 años y está listo para aprender el culto a la carne, «no de carne intacta y atlética, sino de carne sacrificada, verdaderamente viva y palpitante como una herida». Su padre lo exhorta a elegir el camino del sufrimiento, enviando al héroe reticente a una escuela de dolor y tortura donde se aplica literalmente la doctrina de que «el conocimiento debe ser inculcado a golpes». Piñera, cubano, crea un mundo completamente carnal —solo a veces erótico— donde los mataderos reciben nombres como los de los... continue
402.
The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classical Athens, one of the pupils of Plato's Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher suspects that this wasn't an accident and asks Herakles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas', to investigate the death and ultimately a dark, irrational and subversive cult. The second plot unfolds in parallel through the footnotes of the translator of the text. As he proceeds with his work, he becomes increasingly convinced that the original author has hidden a ... continue
403.
The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
Cuban writer Ivan Cardena Maturell meets a mysterious foreigner on a Havana beach who is always in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. Ivan quickly names him 'the man who loved dogs'. The man confesses that he is Ramon Mercader, the man who killed Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, and that he is now in secret exile in Cuba. This is Leonardo Padura's most brilliantly executed novel yet. It is the story of revolutions fought and betrayed, the ways in which political convictions are continually tested, and a critique of the role of fear in consolidating power.
405.
Finding Manana : A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus by Mirta Ojito EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
A vibrant, moving memoir of prizewinning journalist and New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito and her departure from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift—an enduring story of a family caught up in the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century. Mirta Ojito was one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees who traveled to Miami during the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift. Growing up, Ojito was eager to fit in and join Castro’s Young Pioneers, but as she grew older and began to understand the darker side of the Cuban revolution, she and her family began to aspire to a safer, ... continue
406.
Letters from Cuba by Ruth Behar EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, where she works to rescue the rest of her family The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good--the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent--and the bad: the fact th... continue
407.
A Greek Love: A Novel of Cuba by Zoé Valdés EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
For readers of Isabel Allende, Gabriela Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, the story of a woman who must fight for her love and her child in a Cuba suffocated by oppression A free spirit who spends time near the port of Havana, where her friend Osiris is known as the “Greek sailormen's whore,” teenager Zé becomes pregnant after a brief love affair with a captain's son her age. By the time she realizes her condition, the ship has left and the boy is gone. In her father's Cuba, an unwed teenage mother is a source of scandal and shame and a threat to his ambitions in the Party. He disowns her and brutall... continue
408.
The Island of Eternal Love by Daína Chaviano EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
Hearing the life story of a mysterious old woman in a Little Havana bar, Cuban-American Cecilia learns about three generations of a family of diverse origins that includes such members as a reverent Chinese widow, an African slave, and a Spanish matriarch
409.
Outcast by José Latour EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
U.S., Outcast is a smart, multi-voiced, savagely unsentimental tale that blends cultural critique, personal discovery, and explosive violence to reveal the callous, impersonal dysfunction of both contemporary Cuban socialism and its self-congratulatory free-market alternative in Miami. The son of a Cuban mother and a U.s. laborer stationed on the island before the revolution, the novel's protagonist, Elliot Steil, is a down-and-out school teacher in Havana. Quietly resigned to the tedium and simplicity of his life, Elliot has, like many of his fellow Havanans, systematically distanced himself ... continue
410.
Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition by José Esteban Muñoz EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination. On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition include... continue