Kill the Ámpaya! The Best Latin American Baseball Fiction

by Dick Cluster (Translator), Eduardo del Llano (Contributor), Leonardo Padura (Contributor)

“If baseball is really a metaphor for life, then Kill the Ámpaya -- Dick Cluster's wonderful collection of Latin American baseball stories -- is an astonishing record of its beauty and coarseness, redemption and tragedy. You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate these stories, each one hinged on baseball directly or indirectly, and delight in this reading.”—Achy Obejas, author of The Tower of Antilles and Other Stories "These are stories we have lived. . . Some are funny, some cruel or violent, but in the end they are part of our culture that makes us act the way we do. They make me think of the millions of stories that got lost behind us." —Omar Vizquel, from Venezuela, one of baseball's all-time best fielding shortstops who played for the Seattle Mariners, Cleveland Indians, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox, and Toronto Blue Jays. "Baseball is in the soul of millions in Puerto Rico and the other countries that play the game with a Latino flair. These stories are portraits of its place in our lives." —Benjie Molina, former Texas Rangers catcher and first base coach. A rich variety of baseball fiction exists south of the Florida Straits and the Rio Grande, but almost none available in English. This collection translates for the first time stories ranging from the highly literary to the vernacular. These inventive and entertaining stories reveal the place of baseball in Latin America. Mixing fan and fandom, baseball and politics, rural and urban life, sexism and poverty, Kill the Ampaya! reveals how baseball shapes the social fabric of everyday Latin American life. The collection includes well known writers such as Leonardo Padura from Cuba ( The Man Who Loved Dogs ), Sergio Ramírez from Nicaragua ( Divine Punishment , A Thousand Deaths Plus One ). Others are well known writers in their home countries such as Arturo Arango and Eduardo del Llano in Cuba, Alexis Gómez Rosa and José Bobadilla in the Dominican Republic, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro in Puerto Rico, Vicente Leñero in Mexico as well as emerging literary figures such as Salvador Fleján and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón in Venezuela, Sandra Tavarez and Daniel Reyes Germán in the D.R., Carmen Hernández Peña in Cuba.

Genres: Fiction, Baseball, Short Stories

240 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2017

About the author

What seems like mystery, says a reggae lyric by Jimmy Cliff, is only untold history. I've written both crime novels and history books, as well popular economics (another mystery, for sure). Some of these have been translated into Japanese, Danish, Hungarian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian.

Most recently, a few years living in Cuba led me to do translation myself, from Spanish to English, and to co-author a social history of Havana with a Cuban colleague. We tell what it's been like for people living in the Cuban capital over the past five centuries, and something about why.

You can find some of my translations linked via this author page; others won't show up here, because the industry is still ambivalent about translators, but if you search by my name you'll find them.

Reviews

[Shomeret]

This is apparently the year of anthologies for me. Since I knew so little about Latin American baseball, I figured I would learn something from Kill the Ámpaya edited and translated by Dick Cluster. There were also a couple of standout stories including one that totally blew me away with its power. No one asked me to review this April 2017 release, and I don't recall who drew my attention to it.

I have my usual disclaimer for anthologies that I have no commitment to review. I only read a third of the anthology. This means that two thirds of the book didn't interest me, but I certainly did learn a few things about baseball history that I hadn't known.

From the absolutely brilliant story, "A Notorious Home Run" by Puerto Rican author Cezanne Cardona Morales, I discovered American Negro League great Josh Gibson (1911-1947). If I were a baseball fan, I would probably have heard of him, but it's been many years since I've been to a baseball game. My sports are figure skating and gymnastics. Josh Gibson is known as one of the best baseball players of all time. He had eighty home runs to his credit. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in the U.S. in 1972.

Why did "A Notorious Home Run" impress me so much? It combined the drama of a critical moment in an American World Series game with the stark horror of Rwandan genocide. Cezanne Cardona Morales' fictional player Reba Kigali was compared to Josh Gibson, but could he have been a war criminal in Rwanda? I found this story incredibly powerful and moving. It's one of the best short stories I've ever read.

There were stories that disappointed me or failed to engage me in Kill The Ámpaya , but I'm glad that I got to read the stories that I loved in this anthology. In particular, I would single out "A Notorious Home Run" as unforgettable.

For my complete review see http://shomeretmasked.blogspot.com/20...

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some treasures in here. Fans of baseball fiction or Latin American fiction (or both) will want to get their hands on a copy.