Customer Reviews

Calvert Casey: The Collected Stories (Latin America in Translation)

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This collection of seventeen short stories is wonderful. Casey's style is dense and rich, and his plots are alive with hints and lurking presences that cast shadows across the surface of his stories. The Havana of his stories is lusciously and grittily real, but at the same time seen in such a way that there is a scary sensation of collapse and sliding away.

If you are shopping for a Cuban O. Henry, however, seek elsewhere: Casey is not what your high school English teacher had in mind when he was expounding on the short story. And if you find "Wired" challenging your mind, pass Casey by.

It's quite a tragedy that Casey never completed a novel before committing suicide. This collection of his works (some translated into English for the first time) is an amazing taste of his burgeoning style. Casey was a friend of Virgilio Piñera and Severo Sarduy, so I was eager to read these stories. He created tight worlds that convey much in their brevity. Stand-out stories for me include "Homecoming" (where a man returns to Cuba where he's arrested and tortured for unknown reasons), "The Execution" (similar to "Homecoming" where a man is arrested for a crime he didn't commit, and yet he never speaks a word in his defense), and "Piazza Margana" (which is a brilliant love story in the style of Piñera or Poppy Z. Brite). Some stories are difficult to fathom, and yet it's evident the potency Casey had in his writing, especially when writing about his Cuban heritage and his ambivalent sexuality.