Calvert Casey

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 theatre 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.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. 'Out of Havana arrives one of the most significant Hispanic American writers ...Calvert Casey, nourished by the Western literary tradition, yet, obstinately, almost obsessively, 'local.' ...With memories of Havana as a colony and of slavery, of the brothels and black witchcraft and uninterrupted sensuality in an uninterrupted dialogue with the dead, Casey ...began to write far from Cuba out of nostalgia. It led him to return to Cuba and to submerge himself anew in the old city known rock by rock, ghost by ghost, ensuring never to be separated from her again' - "Italo Calvino", written in 1966, reprinted in "Quimera" number 26 (Dec. 1982).