THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE: An Anthology of Cuban Literature

An impressive collection of 30 stories by as many writers, written between the 1920s and the present, and vigorously representative of this embattled island country's experience of civil war, economic and social upheaval, the Castro revolution, and its intellectuals' embrace of exile. Modernist aestheticism is amply displayed (in stories by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Josƒ Lezama Lima, among others), but pales by comparison with such robust reimaginings of indigenous fable and myth as Lydia Cabrera's ""Daddy Turtle and Daddy Tiger"" and the politically charged fiction of Jorge Cardoso, Zoƒ Valdƒs, and Alfonso Hem‡ndez-Cat‡--whose ""I Sent Quinine"" is one of this volume's choicest gems (the other is Jesœs Vega's crisp, harrowing ""Wunderbar""). Authoritative and indispensable.