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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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THE APARTMENT
Set in an art-deco building in South Miami Beach, THE APARTMENT spans the years 1942 -2012, tracing the lives of the various lonely inhabitants of The Helena's Apartment 2B. With a nod to magical realism, we follow characters that literally and figuratively haunt each other as the novel progresses.
In Part One, we meet a Cuban concert pianist who now only plays in a nursing home; a woman whose intelligence officer husband dies, leaving her and their daughter behind; a man waiting on a green card marriage to run its course so that he can divorce his wife and marry his lover, all of whom live together in 2B; the Tajik building manager who pretends to be Cuban to make his life easier in Miami, a Viet Nam Vet who receives packages of his belongings every now and then from his ex wife until one day only an empty box arrives. All are haunted by the spirit of the first tenant in 2B.
In Part Two, the last resident, a woman who is mourning her beloved, has rented the apartment unaware that a recent suicide has occurred there. Distraught and alone, she is watched over by both her neighbors and the suicide victim's ghost.
About exile, homesickness, and displacement, THE APARTMENT asks what - in our violent and lonely century - do we owe one another? And suggests that alone, we are powerless before sorrow and isolation, but in community - in love - we may survive the monsters. Melancholy and beautiful, it ends nonetheless projects a sense of hope. The book too is a meditation on what America means to the author - not a mono-myth - but thousands of individual stories.
Ana Menéndez has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!, The Last War, Loving Che and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. She has a B.A. in English from Florida International University and an M.F.A. from New York University. From 2008 to 2009, she lived in Cairo as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. She has also lived in India, Turkey, Slovakia and The Netherlands, where she designed a creative writing minor at Maastricht University in 2011. For the past 20 years, she has taught at various writing conferences and programs including, most recently, Bread Loaf and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is currently an associate professor at FIU with joint appointments in English and the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab.
In Part Two, the last resident, a woman who is mourning her beloved, has rented the apartment unaware that a recent suicide has occurred there. Distraught and alone, she is watched over by both her neighbors and the suicide victim's ghost.
About exile, homesickness, and displacement, THE APARTMENT asks what - in our violent and lonely century - do we owe one another? And suggests that alone, we are powerless before sorrow and isolation, but in community - in love - we may survive the monsters. Melancholy and beautiful, it ends nonetheless projects a sense of hope. The book too is a meditation on what America means to the author - not a mono-myth - but thousands of individual stories.
Ana Menéndez has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!, The Last War, Loving Che and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. She has a B.A. in English from Florida International University and an M.F.A. from New York University. From 2008 to 2009, she lived in Cairo as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. She has also lived in India, Turkey, Slovakia and The Netherlands, where she designed a creative writing minor at Maastricht University in 2011. For the past 20 years, she has taught at various writing conferences and programs including, most recently, Bread Loaf and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is currently an associate professor at FIU with joint appointments in English and the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab.
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Book
Published 2023-06-27 by Counterpoint |
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Book
Published 2023-06-27 by Counterpoint |