Firefly

Severo Sarduy, Mark Fried (Translated by)

$16.00

Publication Date: March 5th, 2013

Publisher:

Archipelago

ISBN:

9781935744641

Pages:

240

Description

Firefly is a dream-like evocation of pre-war Cuba, replete with hurricanes, mystical cults and slave-markets. The story is the coming-of-age of a precocious and exuberant boy with an oversized head and underdeveloped sense of direction, who views the world as a threatening conspiracy. Told in breathless and lyrical prose, the novel is a loving rendition of a long-lost home, a meditation on exile, and an allegory of Cuba’s isolation in the world.

About the Author

Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), Cuban poet, fiction writer, playwright, and literary critic, is considered one of the best prose artists of the twentieth century. In 1972, he was awarded the Prix Médicis for Cobra, one of his six highly acclaimed novels. Sarduy also painted, hosted a radio program, and, as an editor at Editions du Seuil, introduced contemporary Latin American fiction to European readers. Sarduy was a leading intellectual in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

Mark Fried is the translator of Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the Days, Mirrors, Voices of Time, Upside Down, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Walking Words, and We Say No. He is also the translator of the historical collection Echoes of the Mexican-American War and works by Emilia Ferreiro, José Ignacio López Vigil, Oscar Ugarteche and Rafael Barajas Durán.

Praise for Firefly

Praise for Severo Sarduy's Prix Médicis-winning Cobra

Sarduy is the master of wordscapes that dip, shake and explore. —New York Times Book Review

A paradise of words…a marbled iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything…Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, The moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes an reels into bliss. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Sarduy rendered the epiphany of the body luminous, where the pleasure of void meets the furious fire of the world. —The Washington Post

Severe Sarduy has everything…so brilliant, so funny, and so bewilderingly apt in his borrowings, his derivations, as well as in his inventions, his findings, he leaves one breathless, like a shot of rum.—Richard Howard