Jorge Enrique Lage

An award-winning cyberpunk novel set in mid-21st century Cuba, Freeway: La Movie crosses the absurdity of American pop culture with the deep, fragmented unease of Cuban-US relations. A novel-in-stories set in mid-twenty-first century dystopian Havana, Freeway narrates the adventure of two misfits wandering the construction site of a colossal freeway-to-be — a mysterious feat of engineering that slices through Havana, designed to connect the US and Cuba. The two embark on a futile journey, overlaid with the elusive filming of a documentary about the freeway construction. Both film quality and interior monologues drift aimlessly, haunted by Cuban history and US pop culture. Freeway: La Movie is a satirical novel that attempts to reconcile what might be hopelessly irreconcilable: the body and the machine; analog and digital; post-industrial overdevelopment and post-socialist underdevelopment; Cuba and the US; reality and fiction; the plasticity of personal identity and rigid categories such as gender, class, and nationality. Through the clash of utopian promises and dystopian realities, Freeway reveals the unease of contemporary culture from the US to Cuba.

Una Habana del futuro cercano o del presente alternativo. Un escritor ermita o y soci pata. Un cad ver, una investigaci n. El "misterio de la habitaci n cerrada", reciclado en un fantasmag rico "misterio del caser n colonial cerrado". Una alegor a? En Everglades nada es lo que parece. Psiquiatr a, pol tica, ciencia forense, el noir y el horror, se entrecruzan en el relato de un detective que chapotea en un pantano de voces, visiones y delirios. Otra novela de culto. La distop a de Jorge Enrique Lage nos remite a un Big Bang del que ha surgido una Cuba de viejas consignas y nuevas mafias, de antiguas lealtades y nuevas tribus. Iv n de la NuezA trav s del pretexto de la ciencia ficci n, la literatura cubana en general ha arribado con Lage a un punto de incontrastable originalidad. Carlos Manuel lvarezJorge Enrique Lage ha devenido uno de nuestros mejores constructores de fragmentos. Carlos A. Aguilera

En una Cuba dist pica, como la que siempre narra Lage, los personajes (modelos con pseud nimos reguetoneros, v rgenes de la Caridad del Cobre rob ticas, m diums que localizan fantasmas de agentes de la CIA o del G-2, travestis que quieren imponerse la heterosexualidad, gossipgirls o chivatazzis, es decir, mezclas de chivatas y paparazzis) escenifican la debacle de una civilizaci n basada en la delaci n y el escarnio. Rafael RojasArchivo es una novela performativa: enuncia desde la corporalidad. Lage pone a gozar nuestro cuerpo disciplinado. En un mundo heterot pico se exhibe la fantasmag rica vida de enseres, pacientes, vigilantes y bacterias. Deber a existir nicamente este tipo de novela, tan excitante y triste como La Habana. Martha Luisa Hern ndez CadenasUn buen archivo tiene dosis inexactas de terror, diversi n y discapacidad. El de Jorge Enrique Lage me hizo llamar al Rescue a las dos de la madrugada. Legna Rodr guez Iglesias

The stories gathered in this anthology reflect the many complex challenges Havana’s citizens have had to endure as a result of their country’s political isolation – from the hardships of the ‘Special Period’, to the pitfalls of Cuba’s schizophrenic currency system, to the indignities of becoming a cheap tourist destination for well-heeled Westerners. Moving through various moments in its recent history, as well as through different neighbourhoods – from the prefab, Soviet-era maze of Alamar, to the bars and nightclubs of the Malecón and Vedado – these stories also demonstrate the defiance of Havana: surviving decades of economic disappointment with a flair for the comic, the surreal and the fantastical that remains as fresh as the first dreams of revolution. Translated from the Spanish by Orsola Casagrande and Séamas Carraher.

There are many writers currently creating canon-defying literature inside Cuba. With this in mind, the online magazine SampsoniaWay.org asked its Havana-based Cuban columnist and correspondent Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo to compile a collection of short stories from writers who are creating new trends in Cuban Literature. For this anthology, Pardo Lazo decided to focus on writers of Generaci n A o Cero (Generation Year Zero), a movement of writers who began publishing in 2000. The selected writers included in the anthology are: Jorge Alberto Aguiar D az, Lien Carrazana Lau, Gleyvis Coro Montanet, Ahmel Echevarr a Per , Michel Encinosa F , Jhortensia Espineta Osuna, Carlos Esquivel, Abel Fern ndez-Larrea, Ra l Flores, Jorge Enrique Lage, Polina Mart nez Shvi tsova, Lizabel M nica, Osdany Morales, Erick Mota, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and Lia Villares. "Cubans no longer speak the same language. The rhetoric of monolithic thought has contaminated words, which do not have the same meaning for the elite as they do on the streets. Today, the alternative cultural scene stands against such manipulation and against all nationalistic fictions on the island. In Generation Zero, sarcasm, deterritorialization, transvestism, fragmentation, colloquialism, hybridization, adventure and imagination are redesigning Cuban identity, recovering their power of subversion and resignifying Utopia." -Paulo Antonio Paranagu , Le Monde. (France) "This compilation of short stories might well say more about Cuba's reality than most news reports. Some of the island's best emerging writers reach outside Cuba through their work -even as we look in- sometimes with depth, sometimes with irreverence, but always with great punch." -Juan O. Tamayo, El Nuevo Herald (USA) "Although some may believe it's not true, freedom of expression is never completely undermined. This has been demonstrated by this brilliant group of Cuban authors: with their stories they prove that the days of the Communist Inquisition on the island are about to end." -Jos Mar a Ballester Esquivias, La Gaceta Intereconom a (Spain)