Thursday, September 3, 2009

Profile of Guillermo Rosales

The Miami Herald has a nice profile of the life and some of the works of Cuban writer Guillermo Rosales, known for his writings depicting “the psychic blowback of life under communism.” Blacklisted by Fidel Castro's government and plagued by schizophrenia, Rosales fled to Miami in 1980. He spent the next thirteen years in and out of mental institutions and eventually killed himself on July 6, 1993 at the age of 47.

The Herald’s profile includes an in-depth examination of Rosales’s The Halfway House, an autobiographical novel first published in 1987 and based on Rosales’s time in a mental institution in Little Havana. New Directions published a new translation of The Halfway House in May of this year. Saturday's Glory, Sunday's Resurrection, a finalist for Cuba's 1968 Casa de las Americas award and perhaps Rosales’s best known work, will be published in English by New Directions in 2010.

No comments: