How does one escape? From what one does one need to escape? Why? Ana Menéndez's new collection of interlinked tales is all about escape artists, starting with the author herself. Each tale is attributed to a concocted author, for whom Menéndez has supplied an appropriately imaginative biographical note, including one for herself: "Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance."

Adios, Happy Homeland! is a flight of fancy, or rather, a collection of flights of fancy. Some are uplifting; some lead to nowhere; some are thoroughly grounded in reality; some leap off into magical realism. A maker of parachutes, realizing that the village's plutocrat who has exploitatively rented sewing machines to the villagers is about to ruin the industry, sews up a masterpiece and floats away. An old woman, confused by dementia, rewinds her past until she reenters the space from which she was born. A grandfather, nearing death, tells his granddaughter of his participation in the development of the Redstone rocket and his scheme to display it at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. A young woman defends the practice of flying: "How often have I been at a party and people will start to talk about their dreams of swimming and how they wish to move through the water like fish. And I want to say to them, 'But you can fly, and so few of you do!' People dream of swimming only because they can't do it."

In Adios, Happy Homeland! Menéndez lovingly pays homage to Cuban and Caribbean literary and cultural traditions. Although the book is enriched by knowledge of Cuban poets and writers (of which mine is limited), most of the stories stand on their own. There are some wonderfully brief, quirky chapters that provide valuable insights, such as "Glossary of Caribbean Winds," which describe winds like the "Bayamo: A very violent wind born, like many poets, in the Bight of Bayamo. It often vanishes as quickly as it came, but sometimes can persist for years, impeding those who wish to return quickly home." One chapter includes quotes from poets translated by Google, some astoundingly apt: A Found Poem by Alejo Carpentier — "I wondered sometimes/ if the highest forms of aesthetic/ emotion does not consist simply/ of a supreme understanding of creation.//One day, the men find an alphabet/in the eyes of the chalcedony,/the brown velvet of the moth,/ and then astonished to know/ each snail was spotted, always,/ a poem."

Adios, Happy Homeland! plumbs into the universal curiosity about what else is out there, and what happens if we dare to fly into unknown realms—however, Menéndez offers no easy answers or panaceas.

Ana Menéndez is the acclaimed author of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), Loving Che (2003), and The Last War (2009).