Virgilio Piñera

Virgilio Piñera was born in Cuba in 1912. He lived many years in Argentina, where he published his first novel, La carne de René, and in 1956 a volume of brief fantasies, Cuentos frios (Cold Stories). On his return to Cuba, Piñera published a second novel, Pequeñas maniobras, and staged several plays. His short stories have been translated into French and Italian. He died recently in Cuba.

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Herberto Padilla

Herberto Padilla was born in Cuba in 1932. He spent the year 1948 in the United States teaching in Berlitz schools. He returned to Cuba in 1949 and later worked as a journalist in London and Moscow. His books of poetry include Sent Off the Fields (1972), El hombre junto al mar (1978), Por el momemto (1970), and La marca de la soga. A book of his poetry translated by Alastair Reid will be published in 1981 by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Padilla left Cuba in 1980 and now lives in the New York City area.

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Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata is best known in the West for his novels Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and Sound of the Mountain, and for his early short story The Izu Dancer. Kawabata began writing in the early 1920s while he was still a student at Tokyo Imperial University. Soon thereafter he became one of the chief proponents of a new school of Japanese writing, breaking away from the extremes of realism typical of Japanese literature and attempting to develop a new, impressionistic approach. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1958 and died in 1972.

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Guillermo Cabrera Infante founded Lunes, the literary supplement to Revolución, which he edited until it was banned in 1961. He was then appointed cultural attaché to the Cuban Embassy in Brussels and promoted to chargé d’affaires, but in 1965, while visiting Cuba to attend his mother’s burial, he resigned from his diplomatic position. His collection of short stories, Así en la paz como en la guerra, has been translated into French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Russian, and Chinese. His novels translated into English include Three Trapped Tigers and View of Dawn in the Tropics. He now lives in London.

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Calvert Casey

Calvert Casey, born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1923, of an American father and a Cuban mother, was educated in Cuba but lived in New York from 1946 to 1957, when he returned to Havana. During the first years of the Revolution he was an editor and published his short stories in the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución. Soon after this magazine was banned, he chose his second exile in Rome, where he wrote his final story, “Piazza Margana,” in English. He took his life soon after. His single volume of short stories, El regreso, was published in 1963.

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Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier was born in Havana in 1904. He briefly studied architecture at the University of Havana, then left to become a journalist, a radio-station director, and a teacher of music and cultural history. He has written a history of Afro-Cuban music and several novels, including The Kingdom of This World, Explosion in a Cathedral, Concierto Barroco, and The Lost Steps, for which he received the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1956. Carpentier was the cultural Attaché at the Cuban Embassy in Paris until his death in 1980.

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Lydia Cabrera

Lydia Cabrera, born in Cuba in 1900, left there for Paris in the twenties. One of the first white writers to study the African roots of Cuban culture, she has published books on Afro-Cuban religion, costumes, and music, books of African names in use in Cuba, and two collections of Negro short stories. She has been living in the United States since the Revolution.

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Richard Burgin

Richard Burgin is the author of Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges, a novel, The Man With the Missing Parts, and the forthcoming Conversations With Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is the founding editor of the New York Arts Journal and has published in many magazines and anthologies, including Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Chicago Review, Michigan Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Parabola, and The New York Times Magazine.

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