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Calvert Casey
The Collected Stories
Calvert Casey
Duke University Press, 1998
Hailed as a literary relative of Kafka and Poe by his Italian and Cuban contemporaries, Calvert Casey and his enthralling work have until now remained eclipsed in the United States. This collection brings all of Casey’s powerful short stories and a fragment of an unfinished novel to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Exploring the human condition through poetically unique yet torturous views of the mind, Casey was a renegade artist whose work perceives reality as a smoke screen behind which Truth is hidden. He intended his fiction to disturb and subvert standard, plot-driven views of life.
Born in the United States, Casey was raised in Cuba and spent most of his life there and in Europe. He chose Spanish as his primary artistic tongue. A member of the intelligentsia surrounding Castro in the early years of the revolution, he was eventually exiled—and in 1969 committed suicide in Rome at the age of forty-five. Although most of his luminous stories are set in Havana, his is not a touristy, picturesque landscape but an often strange and nightmarish theater of human passions, inhabited by figures—silhouettes, really—that live on the edge of normality. This volume, which showcases Casey’s mastery of the skill of indirect and gradual revelation, is the most complete to appear in any language and includes a biographical and critical introduction written by Ilan Stavans, the noted novelist and scholar of Hispanic culture.
Readers interested in the art of fiction and in the complexities of the human psyche will find Casey’s work irresistible.


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San Camilo, 1936
The Eve, Feast, and Octave of St. Camillus of the Year 1936 in Madrid
Camilo José Cela
Duke University Press, 1991
Widely regarded as one of the best works by the winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, San Camilo, 1936 appears here for the first time in English translation. One of Spain’s most popular writers, Camilo José Cela is recognized for his experiments with language and with difficult subject matter. In San Camilo, 1936, first published in 1969, these concerns converge in a fascinating narrative that is as challenging as it is rewarding, as troubling as it is compelling.
A story of history as it happens, by turns confusing and startingly clear, echoing with news and rumors, defined by grand gestures and intimate pauses, the novel leads the reader into the ordinary life of extraordinary times. Beginning on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, San Camilo, 1936 follows a twenty-year-old student’s attempts to sort out his private affairs (sex, money, career) in the midst of the turmoil overtaking his country. In vivid and richly textured prose that distinguishes Cela’s work, the emotional reality of civil war takes on a vibrant immediacy that is humorous, tender, and ultimately transforming as a young man tries to come to terms with the historical moment he inhabits—and hopes to survive.
Readers new to Cela will find in this novel ample reason for the author’s growing reputation among audiences worldwide.
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