A diary of life inside Havana by one of Cuba's few bloggers—a worldwide sensation.

Yoani Sánchez is an unusual dissident: no street protests, no attacks on big politicos, no calls for revolution. Rather, she produces a simple diary about what it means to live under the Castro regime in Cuba: the chronic hunger and the difficulty of shopping; the art of repairing ancient appliances; the struggles of living under a propaganda machine that pushes deep into public and private life. For these simple acts of truth-telling her life is one of constant threat. But she continues on, refusing to be silenced—a living response to all who have ceased to believe in a future for Cuba. Yoani received the 2011 International Women of Courage Award.

"Here I am," writes Luisa Valenzuela, "submerged in a sea of notebooks …" Dark Desires is the author's autobiographical fantasia on the ten years she spent living in New York City. Valenzuela has called this book her "apocryphal autobiography," and in it she says very little about her work as a writer, about the city itself, or even about literature. Instead, Dark Desires is a dialogue between the sometimes harmonious, sometimes contradictory worlds of writing and human interaction: for Valenzuela, writing, like love, is an attempt to reach out to another person, to make some sort of connection possible. Here, Valenzuela confronts her own “dark desires”: her need for sexual fulfillment and human tenderness, her indecisiveness about who or what she truly wants, and, overall, the compulsion to keep a written record of all her triumphs and disasters, encounters and obsessions.

Luisa Valenzuela was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her mother, Luisa Mercedes Levinson, was a well-known writer and among the close friends who visited their home were Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Goyanarte, Eduardo Mallea, and Ernesto Sabato. Valenzuela started her career as a journalist when she was very young. She also published a few short stories before 1958, when she moved to France. Her first novel was published while she was living in Paris. In 1969 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to participate in a program for international writers in Iowa. During the 1970s, Valenzuela traveled to Spain, the United States, France, and Mexico, and her travels deeply influenced her work. During this period, the military regime completely changed Argentinian reality, a situation fully represented in her writings published during these years. In 1979, Valenzuela moved to New York to be writer-in-residence at Columbia University, where she gave workshops in English and Spanish.
Read a review of this book in this issue.

Dalkey Archive Press, paperback, 9781564786319

On September 11, 1973, a violent coup removed Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, from office. Thousands were arrested, tortured and killed under General Augusto Pinochet's repressive new regime. Soon after the coup, six-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her younger sister fled the country with their parents for Canada and a life in exile.

In 1978, the Chilean resistance issued a call for exiled activists to return to Latin America. Most women sent their children to live with relatives or with supporters in Cuba, but Carmen's mother kept her precious girls with her. As their mother and stepfather set up a safe house for resistance members in La Paz, Bolivia, the girls' own double lives began. At eighteen, Carmen herself joined the resistance. With conventional day jobs as a cover, she and her new husband moved to Argentina to begin a dangerous new life of their own.

This dramatic, darkly funny narrative, which covers the eventful decade from 1979 to 1989, takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile. Writing with passion and deep personal insight, Carmen captures her constant struggle to reconcile her commitment to the movement with the desires of her youth and her budding sexuality. Something Fierce is a gripping story of love, war and resistance and a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life.

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based writer and theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written or co-written eighteen plays, including The Refugee Hotel", which was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play in 2010. Something Fierce is her first book.