Reinaldo Arenas: la escritura como destino [Reinaldo Arenas: Writing as Destiny] is a collection of essays edited by Rita Molinero and Yolanda Izquierdo, published by Isla Negra Editores (2022). This book will be launched at Books & Books (Coral Gables, Florida) on June 12, 2022, at 4:00pm (EST). Sponsored by FIU’s Cuban Research Institute and Books & Books, the launch will be led by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (University of Miami) in conversation with the editors.

With a prologue by Roberto González Echevarría, the collection includes essays by Juan Abreu, Alejandro Aguilar, Claudia Becerra, Guillermina de Ferrari, Yolanda Izquierdo, Eduardo Lalo, Rita Molinero, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, José Quiroga, and Rubén Ríos Ávila, among others.

Description: Reinaldo Arenas: la escritura como destinobrings together a new compilation of critical essays on his literary work. It is not only on exploring the poetics of the Cuban writer, but also about an approach to his fascinating personality. Thirty-one years after his suicide, Arenas’s writing seduces both his original readers and a new generation always on the threshold of his texts, operas, and cinematic material. Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls], published after his death in 1990 and masterfully brought to the screen by Julian Schnabel (2000), is one more example of the interest that his amazing imagination still arouses.

The essays in this edition are grouped into four independent sections that bring together different critical approaches. The extraordinary inventiveness of Arenas, the love for the beauty and rhythm of his writing, or the irreverence and “apocalyptic glare” in the face of grievances from any type of power, are topics of interest to almost all the contributors to the anthology, without forgetting that liberating space or locus amoenus that always arises between artistic expression and the poet, between writing and his life, which offer Arenas the only possibility of «being» or «existing.» We are thus revealed, once again, with the agony of a marginal poetics (though not marginalized), a standpoint from which the poet explores and fights for the eternal liberation of the body and writing. The anthology also intends to be a sincere and well-deserved posthumous tribute, in addition to the desire to legitimize a work, which although not unknown, is condemned to ostracism in Cuba.

Reinaldo Arenas: la escritura como destino is available at bookstores Casa Norberto, Mágica, Laberinto, La Esquina, La Casita, and www.islanegra.com.

Also see https://www.islanegra.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&view=productdetails&virtuemart_product_id=440&virtuemart_category_id=11

See more on the launch at https://www.booksandbooks.com/event/en-persona-una-tarde-con-rita-molinero-yolanda-izquierdo-y-yolanda-martinez-san-miguel-reinaldo-arenas-la-escritura-como-destino-reune/