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Havana Noir
Brand-new stories Leonardo Padura, Pablo Medina, Alex Abella, Arturo Arango, Lea Aschkenas, Moises Asis, Arnaldo Correa, Mabel Cuesta, Yohamna Depestre, Michel Encinosa Fu, Mylene Fernandez Pintado, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Miguel Mejides, Achy Obejas, Oscar F. Ortiz, Ena Lucia Portela, Mariela Varona Roque, and Yoss.??
To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical sin a Roman ruin of sex and noise, a parallel universe familiar but exotic, and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever desire or pulse has been repressed or denied. Habaneros know that this is neither new--long before Havana collapsed during the Revolution's Special Period, all the way back to colonial times, it had already been the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them--nor particularly true.
In the real Havana--the lawless Havana that never appears in the postcards or tourist guides--the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need--aching and hungry--inevitably turns the human heart darker, feral, and criminal. In this Havana, crime, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, is both wistfully quotidian and personally vicious.
In the stories of Havana Noir, current and former residents of the city--some international sensations such as Leonardo Padura, others exciting new voices like Yohamna Depestre--uncover crimes of violence and loveless sex, of mental cruelty and greed, of self-preservation and collective hysteria.
Achy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, "Gateway to Gridlock." Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer-in-Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana.?? Praise for Havana Miami Herald, 11/25/07 Sewer-dwelling dwarves who run a black market. An engineer moonlighting as a beautician to make ends meet. Street toughs pondering existentialism. An aging aristocrat with an unsolvable dilemma. A Chinese boy bent on avenging his father's death.
These are the characters you will meet in this remarkable collection, the latest edition of an original noir series featuring stories set in a distinct neighborhood of a particular city. Throughout these 18 stories, current and former residents of Havana -- some well-known, some previously undiscovered -- deliver gritty tales of depravation, depravity, heroic perseverance, revolution and longing in a city mythical and widely misunderstood.
This is noir of a different shade and texture, shadowy and malevolent, to be sure, but desperate, too, heartbreakingly wounded, the stories linked more by the acrid pall of a failed but seemingly interminable experiment than by genre. Ambiguities abound, and ingenuity flourishes even as morality evaporates in the daily struggle for self-preservation.
In this dark light the best of these stories are also the most disturbing. What For, This Burden by Michel Encinosa Fu, a resident of Havana, is a brutal and wrenching tale of brothers involved in drug deals and child prostitution; they peddle their own sister. The Red Bridge, by Yoss, another Havana resident, depicts a violent incident in the lives of two friends with apparently great potential who, though acutely aware of the depravity of their situation, are powerless or unwilling to extract themselves from the mean streets of El Patio.
Cuban engineer Mariela Varona Roque's offering, The Orchid, is a short but powerful tale of the demise of a young boy frequently entrusted to the care of a browbeaten neighbor obsessed with his solitary orchid.
Isolation, poverty and despair even in the midst of friends and family, lead to unthinkable cruelty, a common thread in these and other stories. But just as prevalent are resilience, hope, honor and ferocious devotion to the island. Pablo Mendina's Johnny Ventura's Seventh Try centers on the oft-repeated theme of getting to La Yuma, the United States. After six failures a man succeeds in building a boat sturdy enough to safely cross the Straits, only to find himself turning in circles in excruciating angst once out of the water.
Alone in a decaying building overlooking the Malecon, a woman in Mylene Fernandez Pintado's The Scene sustains a semblance of quiet elegance for her dying mother. Then she's free but decides to stay on the island rather than join her brother in San Francisco. And in Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's beautifully rendered The Dinner, an elderly gentleman, his wife and a servant who hasn't been paid in 40 years agonize in their crumbling, once elegant mansion, over their inability to find the ingredients for an annual dinner for friends. With faint echoes of The Gift of the Magi and perfectly bridging the pre- and post-revolut...
To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical sin a Roman ruin of sex and noise, a parallel universe familiar but exotic, and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever desire or pulse has been repressed or denied. Habaneros know that this is neither new--long before Havana collapsed during the Revolution's Special Period, all the way back to colonial times, it had already been the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them--nor particularly true.
In the real Havana--the lawless Havana that never appears in the postcards or tourist guides--the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need--aching and hungry--inevitably turns the human heart darker, feral, and criminal. In this Havana, crime, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, is both wistfully quotidian and personally vicious.
In the stories of Havana Noir, current and former residents of the city--some international sensations such as Leonardo Padura, others exciting new voices like Yohamna Depestre--uncover crimes of violence and loveless sex, of mental cruelty and greed, of self-preservation and collective hysteria.
Achy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, "Gateway to Gridlock." Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer-in-Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana.?? Praise for Havana Miami Herald, 11/25/07 Sewer-dwelling dwarves who run a black market. An engineer moonlighting as a beautician to make ends meet. Street toughs pondering existentialism. An aging aristocrat with an unsolvable dilemma. A Chinese boy bent on avenging his father's death.
These are the characters you will meet in this remarkable collection, the latest edition of an original noir series featuring stories set in a distinct neighborhood of a particular city. Throughout these 18 stories, current and former residents of Havana -- some well-known, some previously undiscovered -- deliver gritty tales of depravation, depravity, heroic perseverance, revolution and longing in a city mythical and widely misunderstood.
This is noir of a different shade and texture, shadowy and malevolent, to be sure, but desperate, too, heartbreakingly wounded, the stories linked more by the acrid pall of a failed but seemingly interminable experiment than by genre. Ambiguities abound, and ingenuity flourishes even as morality evaporates in the daily struggle for self-preservation.
In this dark light the best of these stories are also the most disturbing. What For, This Burden by Michel Encinosa Fu, a resident of Havana, is a brutal and wrenching tale of brothers involved in drug deals and child prostitution; they peddle their own sister. The Red Bridge, by Yoss, another Havana resident, depicts a violent incident in the lives of two friends with apparently great potential who, though acutely aware of the depravity of their situation, are powerless or unwilling to extract themselves from the mean streets of El Patio.
Cuban engineer Mariela Varona Roque's offering, The Orchid, is a short but powerful tale of the demise of a young boy frequently entrusted to the care of a browbeaten neighbor obsessed with his solitary orchid.
Isolation, poverty and despair even in the midst of friends and family, lead to unthinkable cruelty, a common thread in these and other stories. But just as prevalent are resilience, hope, honor and ferocious devotion to the island. Pablo Mendina's Johnny Ventura's Seventh Try centers on the oft-repeated theme of getting to La Yuma, the United States. After six failures a man succeeds in building a boat sturdy enough to safely cross the Straits, only to find himself turning in circles in excruciating angst once out of the water.
Alone in a decaying building overlooking the Malecon, a woman in Mylene Fernandez Pintado's The Scene sustains a semblance of quiet elegance for her dying mother. Then she's free but decides to stay on the island rather than join her brother in San Francisco. And in Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's beautifully rendered The Dinner, an elderly gentleman, his wife and a servant who hasn't been paid in 40 years agonize in their crumbling, once elegant mansion, over their inability to find the ingredients for an annual dinner for friends. With faint echoes of The Gift of the Magi and perfectly bridging the pre- and post-revolut...
322 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2007
104 people are currently reading
497 people want to read
About the author
Achy Obejas
46 books151 followersAchy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo and We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including Akashic's Chicago Noir. A long time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, “Gateway to Gridlock.” Her articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, Village Voice, The Nation, Playboy, and MS, among others. Currently, she is a music contributor to the Washington Post and the Sor Juana Writer in Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
June 20, 2024
This was a mix bag of chips as far as short story collection goes.
I thoroughly enjoyed a few and the rest fell really flat but I did learn a lot more about live in Havanna.
I thoroughly enjoyed a few and the rest fell really flat but I did learn a lot more about live in Havanna.
Read
June 2, 2008(This review originally published in The Believer magazine, Feb '08.)
In Lea Aschkenas’s “La Coca-Cola del Olvido,” one of eighteen stories collected in Havana Noir, drizzle turns to a downpour and “the few unfortunate souls still in the street ran as if on fire, intent on getting home before the dilapidated balconies above them began falling.” What makes the Havana of the seventeenth title in Akashic Books’ popular urban noir series so surly? Editor Achy Obejas writes in the introduction of a city where “the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need… [turning:] the human heart feral.”
In 1991, the last shipment of Soviet oil entered Havana harbor, ending thirty years of Soviet economic aid to Cuba, and Fidel Castro announced the “Special Period in Peacetime” to gird the island’s 11 million inhabitants for the hardships that would follow. Cuba in the early 1990s became an island of contradictions. It was prohibited for a Cuban to carry dollars, but American money was the only currency accepted at most Havana businesses. At government stores, salesmen in name only sat all day behind empty old mechanical cash registers in front of stockless shelves. In dark, desultory cafeterias, waiters took monotonous orders for sugar water and stale congris of black beans and rice, the only items on the menu.
As collected in Havana Noir, the fictive repercussions of the Special Period range from absurd to terrifying. In “Nowhere Man,” Miguel Mejides constructs a (literally) underground syndicate of dwarves supplying the city above with black-market sausages. In “What for, This Burden” Michel Encinosa Fú introduces characters of cruelty so shocking you may need to set the book down. Leonardo Padura abandons the colorful cool of his Mario Conde mysteries for the spiraling decadence of “Staring at the Sun,” whose narrator gazes from a luscious mist of liquor and parkisonil upon greasy walls as the grotesques accumulate. “The black guy’s head explodes and rolls back. Even I get splattered with his blood. It’s practically black, like the dog’s, although it’s got little white dots.”
Obejas hardly gives herself credit, but she shines as a translator. (Besides contributing her own story, twelve of the translations are attributed to the editor.) Padura’s garrulous perversion is as distinct as the soliloquy of a deaf babalao in Arnaldo Correa’s “Olúo”: “In a quiet area, we fished for langostinos and cooked them in an old can of Spanish sausages that my father had brought in his bag…. Life can be so marvelous!” Obejas’s translation of “The Red Bridge” by the author Yoss captures the idiom of a pair of outcast socios from El Patio: “If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face.”
Perhaps this Havana is so surly because she is for sale, pimped by the government and by every Habanero out to make an American buck. In Mylene Fernández Pintado’s “The Scene,” a bureaucrat making room for a tourist remodel evicts a woman caring for her ailing mother. “Everything was architecturally and financially aligned. Emptying the building was just the first task.” At its best, noir is in the darkness of the human heart. And in urban noir, humanity is the darkness at the heart of the city. In Havana Noir, better than half the stories are truly gripping, and all of them resuscitate a dark Havana that seethes beneath the idealized island of our imagination.
In Lea Aschkenas’s “La Coca-Cola del Olvido,” one of eighteen stories collected in Havana Noir, drizzle turns to a downpour and “the few unfortunate souls still in the street ran as if on fire, intent on getting home before the dilapidated balconies above them began falling.” What makes the Havana of the seventeenth title in Akashic Books’ popular urban noir series so surly? Editor Achy Obejas writes in the introduction of a city where “the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need… [turning:] the human heart feral.”
In 1991, the last shipment of Soviet oil entered Havana harbor, ending thirty years of Soviet economic aid to Cuba, and Fidel Castro announced the “Special Period in Peacetime” to gird the island’s 11 million inhabitants for the hardships that would follow. Cuba in the early 1990s became an island of contradictions. It was prohibited for a Cuban to carry dollars, but American money was the only currency accepted at most Havana businesses. At government stores, salesmen in name only sat all day behind empty old mechanical cash registers in front of stockless shelves. In dark, desultory cafeterias, waiters took monotonous orders for sugar water and stale congris of black beans and rice, the only items on the menu.
As collected in Havana Noir, the fictive repercussions of the Special Period range from absurd to terrifying. In “Nowhere Man,” Miguel Mejides constructs a (literally) underground syndicate of dwarves supplying the city above with black-market sausages. In “What for, This Burden” Michel Encinosa Fú introduces characters of cruelty so shocking you may need to set the book down. Leonardo Padura abandons the colorful cool of his Mario Conde mysteries for the spiraling decadence of “Staring at the Sun,” whose narrator gazes from a luscious mist of liquor and parkisonil upon greasy walls as the grotesques accumulate. “The black guy’s head explodes and rolls back. Even I get splattered with his blood. It’s practically black, like the dog’s, although it’s got little white dots.”
Obejas hardly gives herself credit, but she shines as a translator. (Besides contributing her own story, twelve of the translations are attributed to the editor.) Padura’s garrulous perversion is as distinct as the soliloquy of a deaf babalao in Arnaldo Correa’s “Olúo”: “In a quiet area, we fished for langostinos and cooked them in an old can of Spanish sausages that my father had brought in his bag…. Life can be so marvelous!” Obejas’s translation of “The Red Bridge” by the author Yoss captures the idiom of a pair of outcast socios from El Patio: “If he bends to get the blade in front of Yako, those Nike 48s are gonna leave footprints all over his face.”
Perhaps this Havana is so surly because she is for sale, pimped by the government and by every Habanero out to make an American buck. In Mylene Fernández Pintado’s “The Scene,” a bureaucrat making room for a tourist remodel evicts a woman caring for her ailing mother. “Everything was architecturally and financially aligned. Emptying the building was just the first task.” At its best, noir is in the darkness of the human heart. And in urban noir, humanity is the darkness at the heart of the city. In Havana Noir, better than half the stories are truly gripping, and all of them resuscitate a dark Havana that seethes beneath the idealized island of our imagination.
Want to read
December 13, 2016Free e-book advent calendar from Akashic Books: Download Havana Noir for FREE until midnight, December 13, 2016!
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Want to read
January 17, 200801/16/08 got from MOTB
June 25, 2008
The best so far from the series.
Want to read
July 29, 2015Brand-new stories by: Leonardo Padura, Pablo Medina, Alex Abella, Arturo Arango, Lea Aschkenas, Moises Asis, Arnaldo Correa, Mabel Cuesta, Yohamna Depestre, Michel Encinosa Fu, Mylene Fernandez Pintado, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Miguel Mejides, Achy Obejas, Oscar F. Ortiz, Ena Lucia Portela, Mariela Varona Roque, and Yoss.??
To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical sin city: a Roman ruin of sex and noise, a parallel universe familiar but exotic, and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever desire or pulse has been repressed or denied. Habaneros know that this is neither new--long before Havana collapsed during the Revolution's Special Period, all the way back to colonial times, it had already been the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them--nor particularly true.
In the real Havana--the lawless Havana that never appears in the postcards or tourist guides--the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need--aching and hungry--inevitably turns the human heart darker, feral, and criminal. In this Havana, crime, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, is both wistfully quotidian and personally vicious.
In the stories of Havana Noir, current and former residents of the city--some international sensations such as Leonardo Padura, others exciting new voices like Yohamna Depestre--uncover crimes of violence and loveless sex, of mental cruelty and greed, of self-preservation and collective hysteria.
Achy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, "Gateway to Gridlock." Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer-in-Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana.??
Praise for *Havana Noir: *
Miami Herald, 11/25/07
Sewer-dwelling dwarves who run a black market. An engineer moonlighting as a beautician to make ends meet. Street toughs pondering existentialism. An aging aristocrat with an unsolvable dilemma. A Chinese boy bent on avenging his father's death.
These are the characters you will meet in this remarkable collection, the latest edition of an original noir series featuring stories set in a distinct neighborhood of a particular city. Throughout these 18 stories, current and former residents of Havana -- some well-known, some previously undiscovered -- deliver gritty tales of depravation, depravity, heroic perseverance, revolution and longing in a city mythical and widely misunderstood.
This is noir of a different shade and texture, shadowy and malevolent, to be sure, but desperate, too, heartbreakingly wounded, the stories linked more by the acrid pall of a failed but seemingly interminable experiment than by genre. Ambiguities abound, and ingenuity flourishes even as morality evaporates in the daily struggle for self-preservation.
In this dark light the best of these stories are also the most disturbing. What For, This Burden by Michel Encinosa Fu, a resident of Havana, is a brutal and wrenching tale of brothers involved in drug deals and child prostitution; they peddle their own sister. The Red Bridge, by Yoss, another Havana resident, depicts a violent incident in the lives of two friends with apparently great potential who, though acutely aware of the depravity of their situation, are powerless or unwilling to extract themselves from the mean streets of El Patio.
Cuban engineer Mariela Varona Roque's offering, The Orchid, is a short but powerful tale of the demise of a young boy frequently entrusted to the care of a browbeaten neighbor obsessed with his solitary orchid.
Isolation, poverty and despair even in the midst of friends and family, lead to unthinkable cruelty, a common thread in these and other stories. But just as prevalent are resilience, hope, honor and ferocious devotion to the island. Pablo Mendina's Johnny Ventura's Seventh Try centers on the oft-repeated theme of getting to La Yuma, the United States. After six failures a man succeeds in building a boat sturdy enough to safely cross the Straits, only to find himself turning in circles in excruciating angst once out of the water.
Alone in a decaying building overlooking the Malecon, a woman in Mylene Fernandez Pintado's The Scene sustains a semblance of quiet elegance for her dying mother. Then she's free but decides to stay on the island rather than join her brother in San Francisco. And in Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's beautifully rendered The Dinner, an elderly gentleman, his wife and a servant who hasn't been paid in 40 years agonize in their crumbling, once elegant mansion, over their inability to find the ingredients for an annual dinner for friends. With faint echoes of The Gift of the Magi and perfectly bridging the pre- and post-revolution days, the story is achingly splendid.
Several murder stories, including one about an arrogant serial killer egged on by a woman he phones to brag about his exploits, and a film-noir style piece featuring a San Francisco private eye sent to bring out a thrill-seeking rich kid on the eve of the revolution, round out the collection and justify its place in the series.
But if you're looking for slick, moody, detective noir, sunsets, mojitos at La Florida, or dancing girls at La Tropicana, you won't find them in Havana Noir. Along with grit and pluck and the disintegration of structure and values, there is an overarching sadness to these stories as evidenced by perhaps the most disturbing commonality: repeated loveless, disconnected sex, including rape and incest, but more often just mindless, pleasureless consensual copulation, all that's left to fill the time while waiting for something to change.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 12/2/07
The streets of Havana teem with a diverse, complex people whose wants and needs are often neglected but who are connected by one ideal: to have a good life.
In this superb collection of short stories edited by novelist, poet and journalist Achy Obejas, myriad characters show just how far they will go for just a small part of the world and keep their dignity despite, as Obejas says, "the damage inured by self-preservation at all costs."
There's the cross-eyed young man whose "affliction" prevents him from getting a job but who finds a kind of refuge with a black market-dealing dwarf. There's a Chinese boy trying to avenge his father. And there's the woman tethered to Cuba by her dying mother.
The 18 stories by current and former residents of Havana are gritty, heartbreaking and capture the city. Each story an unflinching look at Havana, giving a sense of hope — and hopelessness — for what the city was and is now and could be again.
Says Obejas in her introduction, "In the real Havana — the aphotic Havana that never appears in the postcards, tourist guides, or testimonies of either the political left or right — the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need inevitably turns the human heart feral."
This is the kind of keen insight we've come to expect from the Noir anthologies published by Akashic. Each anthology features a different city, such as Baltimore, Miami, San Francisco and others, and acts as a mini-guide to each area. The compressed action, the layered plots and the character studies packed into just a few pages make short stories riveti
**
September 5, 2023
1. Miguel Mejides - Ο άνθρωπος από το πουθενά (2,5/5)
2. Ena Lucia Portela - Η τελευταία επιβάτισσα (2,5/5)
3. Mylene Fernandez Pintado - Η σκηνή (2,5/5)
4. Leonardo Padura - Κοιτάζοντας τον ήλιο (3,5/5)
5. Carolina-Garcia Aguilera - Το δείπνο (3/5)
6. Pablo Medina - Η έβδομη προσπάθεια του Τζόνι Βεντούρα (3/5)
7. Alex Abella - Σανγκάη (3/5)
8. Moises Asis - Δολοφονία στην οδό Λα Ρόσα, αριθμός 503 - (2,5)
9. Arturo Arango - Δολοφονία κατά τα λεγόμενα της πεθεράς μου (2,5/5)
10. Mariela Varona Roque - Η ορχιδέα (2,5/5)
11. Michel Encinosa Fu - Για ποιο λόγο αυτό το βάρος (2/5)
12. Yoss - Η κόκκινη γέφυρα (4)
13. Lea Aschkenas - La Coca-Cola del Olvido (3/5)
14. Achy Obejas - Zenzizenzic (2/5)
15. Mabel Cuesta - Οι παρθένες τις Ρέγλα - (1,5/5)
16. Arnaldo Correa - Ολούο (2/5)
17. Oscar F. Ortiz - Ξεκαθάρισμα λογαριασμών (3/5)
18. Yohamna Depestre - Αμπίκου (2/5)
2. Ena Lucia Portela - Η τελευταία επιβάτισσα (2,5/5)
3. Mylene Fernandez Pintado - Η σκηνή (2,5/5)
4. Leonardo Padura - Κοιτάζοντας τον ήλιο (3,5/5)
5. Carolina-Garcia Aguilera - Το δείπνο (3/5)
6. Pablo Medina - Η έβδομη προσπάθεια του Τζόνι Βεντούρα (3/5)
7. Alex Abella - Σανγκάη (3/5)
8. Moises Asis - Δολοφονία στην οδό Λα Ρόσα, αριθμός 503 - (2,5)
9. Arturo Arango - Δολοφονία κατά τα λεγόμενα της πεθεράς μου (2,5/5)
10. Mariela Varona Roque - Η ορχιδέα (2,5/5)
11. Michel Encinosa Fu - Για ποιο λόγο αυτό το βάρος (2/5)
12. Yoss - Η κόκκινη γέφυρα (4)
13. Lea Aschkenas - La Coca-Cola del Olvido (3/5)
14. Achy Obejas - Zenzizenzic (2/5)
15. Mabel Cuesta - Οι παρθένες τις Ρέγλα - (1,5/5)
16. Arnaldo Correa - Ολούο (2/5)
17. Oscar F. Ortiz - Ξεκαθάρισμα λογαριασμών (3/5)
18. Yohamna Depestre - Αμπίκου (2/5)
February 28, 2023
300+ brutal pages recounting Cuban pain and only pain. Future readers should know heavy contents (CW) include topics of rape, child abuse, suicide, murder, racism, homophobia, misogyny.
June 30, 2017
As with any anthology, some stuck with me and some missed the mark. Among the really great stories are "The Dinner" (an update on a classic story that's so famous it's a spoiler to name it) and "The Orchid." I once had a girlfriend who insisted that the 1998 film Very Bad Things was the epitome of film noir because it had black humor, and, you know, noir means black, and no evidence from decades of film scholarship could convince her otherwise. In a similar vein, the noir label gets stretched thin to accommodate a few of the entries collected here, but what unites them all is worm's eye view into the desperation of life at the bottom rungs of a society that failed to live up to its promises of equality, prosperity and social justice.
April 16, 2010
From a series of noir anthologies by Akashic. Stories of despair, grit and lawlessness in the streets of Havana. If you're a noir fan (and even if you're not a noir fan)and looking for a bit of Cuban culture, then this book's for you. Moscow, London and Toronto are next on my list. Thanks for the recommendation, Daisy.
November 4, 2012
Good selection of contemporary Cuban short stories.
What was most interesting was the dichotomy of the point of view between the Cubans still living in Habana and the expats. The former, seeing things as they are and being matter of fact. The latter, mostly being negative, pessimistic, and complaining.
For me, the stories written by those still living on the island were more meaningful.
What was most interesting was the dichotomy of the point of view between the Cubans still living in Habana and the expats. The former, seeing things as they are and being matter of fact. The latter, mostly being negative, pessimistic, and complaining.
For me, the stories written by those still living on the island were more meaningful.
December 29, 2009
I think Obejas could have cut out some of the stories and it would have been a much more enjoyable read. That said, there are some really creepy/excellent stories in this collection -- I'm thinking of "The Last Passenger" by Ena Lucia Portela and "Abiku" by Yohamna Depestre specifically.
July 17, 2017
A decent, and often interesting, collection on short stories, though some I thought were borderline noir. About the usual percentage of ones I really liked and others I just dumped after a few pages. at least one was too brutal for me, the treatment of some young girls.
January 29, 2009
Good collection of stories. You gotta love fiction:)
Want to read
October 30, 2010pub bookfinder
January 13, 2014
Havana is a complicated city: it can be very dark and alienating. My favorites were the stories about the Special Period, where starvation pushed people to self-destruction beyond humiliation.
August 6, 2014
Good collection of stories.
March 25, 2016
Like any short story collection, many of these stories are good and many are bad, unfortunately the best story in the collection is by Leanardo Padura who i am already familiary with.
February 26, 2017
A great translator makes all the difference. Achy Obejas does not disappoint. In addition to the noir theme, the stories give a good depiction of Cuban life in different decades.
March 25, 2019
So few highs (but really really good highs) and so many lows.
April 15, 2020
As someone who has become accustomed to reading a fair amount of noir literature, it is useful to reflect upon the ways that noir is both very general and very context-specific. Whatever sort of noir writing one reads, there is going to be some sort of crime, frequently death or the hazard of death, and a feeling of alienation between the lead characters (and presumably the reader) and the forces of law and order that exist in a society. Those are definitely present in all of the stories included in this excellent collection and a great many other works. What makes noir compelling, though, is the way that the general mood of alienation and hostility to law and order is filtered through the specific history and culture of the location chosen for the noir story or novel as well as the specific skill and perspective of the reader in presenting a compelling look at those who find themselves to be cut off from the world around them, hostile to it but at the same time not seeking to overthrow it or replace it with something possibly better. Noir is a literature of cynicism and even fatalism, not a literature of revolutionary fervor. And that is certainly the case here.
This particular book of more than 350 pages consists of eighteen stories divided into four parts that are set in various neighborhoods in Havana, all of which show the strain of Cuba's poverty and the burden of history. The first four stories are seen as characters sleepless in Havana, and the first story, about a thief who finds himself being punished in a grimly appropriate way, is an unrepresentative story but nonetheless a compelling one. The second part of the book is titled Escape To Nowhere, and a couple of stories here particularly resonated with me, including a story of a man's seventh attempt to flee to the United States as well as the escape of an impoverished aristocrat in death to avoid shame and the work of a detective in trying to save an American and his Cuban girlfriend from a Chinese casino at the end of Batista's rule. The third section discusses sudden rage and it includes a story about a red bridge where people find themselves unable to escape violence, sexual immorality, and drunkenness, as well as a gloomy look at the anger of a mother whose daughter had gone to Miami for art research and been killed in a terrorist attack. The fourth and final section of the book, drowning in silence, includes a fascinating story about the revenge of a Chinese Cuban for the wrongs done to his family as well as a chilling story about murder involving the search for space told from the point of view of the killer.
What makes these stories compelling is the combination of the three elements that make them up: the alienated but essentially unrevolutionary attitude of noir in general that the authors tap into, the specific history and rich detail of Havana and its context that provides the setting, and the skill of the authors in writing engrossing stories. As these stories demonstrate, the combination of a noir approach, a rich knowledge and interest in Havana as a setting with all that entails in history and culture, and the author's own skill leads to stories that are diverse even if they are all related to each other in representing the struggle of people in ways that are outside of the law and that exploit the corruption and decay of Havana, but in ways that essentially do not seek to overturn the system as a whole but rather make a place for someone within that system. And this book does a good job at showing just how precarious a place people can seek and find within the various neighborhoods of Havana.
This particular book of more than 350 pages consists of eighteen stories divided into four parts that are set in various neighborhoods in Havana, all of which show the strain of Cuba's poverty and the burden of history. The first four stories are seen as characters sleepless in Havana, and the first story, about a thief who finds himself being punished in a grimly appropriate way, is an unrepresentative story but nonetheless a compelling one. The second part of the book is titled Escape To Nowhere, and a couple of stories here particularly resonated with me, including a story of a man's seventh attempt to flee to the United States as well as the escape of an impoverished aristocrat in death to avoid shame and the work of a detective in trying to save an American and his Cuban girlfriend from a Chinese casino at the end of Batista's rule. The third section discusses sudden rage and it includes a story about a red bridge where people find themselves unable to escape violence, sexual immorality, and drunkenness, as well as a gloomy look at the anger of a mother whose daughter had gone to Miami for art research and been killed in a terrorist attack. The fourth and final section of the book, drowning in silence, includes a fascinating story about the revenge of a Chinese Cuban for the wrongs done to his family as well as a chilling story about murder involving the search for space told from the point of view of the killer.
What makes these stories compelling is the combination of the three elements that make them up: the alienated but essentially unrevolutionary attitude of noir in general that the authors tap into, the specific history and rich detail of Havana and its context that provides the setting, and the skill of the authors in writing engrossing stories. As these stories demonstrate, the combination of a noir approach, a rich knowledge and interest in Havana as a setting with all that entails in history and culture, and the author's own skill leads to stories that are diverse even if they are all related to each other in representing the struggle of people in ways that are outside of the law and that exploit the corruption and decay of Havana, but in ways that essentially do not seek to overturn the system as a whole but rather make a place for someone within that system. And this book does a good job at showing just how precarious a place people can seek and find within the various neighborhoods of Havana.
June 3, 2025
In the Introduction for the book, the editor provides a great quote to sum up “noir”. It reads, “Crime stories, especially those with detective protagonists, try to find order, to right things; noirs wearily revel in the vacuum of values, give in to conflict not as a puzzle to be solved but as a cul-de-sac. Noirs explore and expose but refuse to solve.”
The editor also references older Cuban writers now long gone but who contributed to earlier versions of Cuban Noir like Carpentier’s The Chase, thereby setting expectations for a great collection of noir short stories. Having previously read Akashic’s Los Angeles Noir and Paduro’s Adios Hemingway, I was ready to be amazed
In the end this wasn’t a collection of noir stories as much as it was a collection of stories with the United States (La Yuma) oftentimes either looming just off-stage or directly part of the story. If the intent was to present a collection of short stories that had death, crime and mayhem as sub-plots, then the objective was achieved. But I fail to see the noir aspect of a mother working a side hustle for some extra bucks after her daughter has left for Miami and subsequently learning of a mishap that befalls her daughter over 100 miles away. Just one example of how this collection of stories in Havana Noir largely fails to deliver on its own definition of noir.
The editor also references older Cuban writers now long gone but who contributed to earlier versions of Cuban Noir like Carpentier’s The Chase, thereby setting expectations for a great collection of noir short stories. Having previously read Akashic’s Los Angeles Noir and Paduro’s Adios Hemingway, I was ready to be amazed
In the end this wasn’t a collection of noir stories as much as it was a collection of stories with the United States (La Yuma) oftentimes either looming just off-stage or directly part of the story. If the intent was to present a collection of short stories that had death, crime and mayhem as sub-plots, then the objective was achieved. But I fail to see the noir aspect of a mother working a side hustle for some extra bucks after her daughter has left for Miami and subsequently learning of a mishap that befalls her daughter over 100 miles away. Just one example of how this collection of stories in Havana Noir largely fails to deliver on its own definition of noir.
January 4, 2022
This was a big surprise, I absolutely loved this! Every story was at least a bit depraved and/or brutal, but all in very different ways. 'Crime' is much simpler in some stories, like working as a black market beautician, but overall still a lot of murder, rape and gore. Stories I particularly loved were 'The Last Passenger' (Ena Lucía Portela), 'The Scene' (Mylene Fernández Pintado), 'Murder, According to My Mother-in-Law' (Arturo Arango), 'The Dinner' (Carolina García-Aguilera), 'Johnny Ventura’s Seventh Try' (Pablo Medina) and 'Zenzizenzic' (the editor, Achy Obejas) -- though to be honest it is quite hard to pick favourites.
July 8, 2024
This is an excellent compilation of short stories. I'm not usually a short story fan, nor, am I a thriller reader. But some of the authors' works really drew me in, and I'd like to read more from these few.
That said, I was fine with the thriller noir aspect. What bothered me was an overabundance of indiscriminate sex in far too many of the stories. I felt they were very female-objectifying and looked at the sexual act (between pretty much unknowns) similar to just blowing your nose or sneezing. I would hate to think that this is the norm in Cuba.
That said, I was fine with the thriller noir aspect. What bothered me was an overabundance of indiscriminate sex in far too many of the stories. I felt they were very female-objectifying and looked at the sexual act (between pretty much unknowns) similar to just blowing your nose or sneezing. I would hate to think that this is the norm in Cuba.
September 24, 2021
I've never read such a mixed bag of stories. Some of them were really good, some of them were awful, and a lot were so-so. I don't know whether I'd recommend it anyone or not.
CN: Racism, ableism, homelessness, terminal illness, death of a parent, death of a child, dog fighting, substance misuse, murder, assisted suicide, starvation, homophobia, r*pe, in**est, p**dophilia, infidelity, violence, imprisonment
CN: Racism, ableism, homelessness, terminal illness, death of a parent, death of a child, dog fighting, substance misuse, murder, assisted suicide, starvation, homophobia, r*pe, in**est, p**dophilia, infidelity, violence, imprisonment
June 16, 2021
Are you kidding me?
This is more like poorly written junior high science fiction than classic noir detective stories. There is little suspense; There is little drama; There is a lot of vulgar Self indulgent hand wringing.
This is more like poorly written junior high science fiction than classic noir detective stories. There is little suspense; There is little drama; There is a lot of vulgar Self indulgent hand wringing.
August 25, 2021
Very uneven collection of short stories by Cuban authors or are about Havana.
January 10, 2022
Poetic noir
Wonderful sense of place. I decided to read this book because I admire Leonardo Padura. What a pleasure to discover other great Cuban writers.
Wonderful sense of place. I decided to read this book because I admire Leonardo Padura. What a pleasure to discover other great Cuban writers.
July 2, 2021
As with all the Noir series we've read, each and every story pulses with a knowledge that comes from having lived in and been steeped in a place and its history.
That said, the first two stories were heavy, almost as if they resisted being read, the premise of each was very interesting and that's why we continued reading, but they were written in a way that did not engage us.
However as we moved deeper into the collection, the sparks started flying, it was in the dialogue: sarcastic, snarky, humorous; the characters that were resigned, melodramatic, desperate; and the setting that seemed to come alive through the descriptions and existence in the particular political and socio-economic clime.
Definitely a collection in which lies a story for every reader.
TW: rape, sexual abuse of minors, murder.
That said, the first two stories were heavy, almost as if they resisted being read, the premise of each was very interesting and that's why we continued reading, but they were written in a way that did not engage us.
However as we moved deeper into the collection, the sparks started flying, it was in the dialogue: sarcastic, snarky, humorous; the characters that were resigned, melodramatic, desperate; and the setting that seemed to come alive through the descriptions and existence in the particular political and socio-economic clime.
Definitely a collection in which lies a story for every reader.
TW: rape, sexual abuse of minors, murder.
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