Books by Gustavo Perez Firmat

With fascinating insights into how both ordinary and famous Cuban-Americans, including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos, Gloria Estefan, and Jose Kozer, have lived "life on the hyphen," this is an expanded, updated edition of the classic, award-winning study of

The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacation or parenthetical insertion--in what was perceived as the established course of the modern Hispanic novel''s development. Yet, as Pérez Firmat argues, though this genre saw itself as recreative and interstitial, it deliberately precipitated "a class war not between social classes but between literary classes." Concentrating on source material not widely available, Pérez Firmat reconstructs the reception these novels received at the time of their publication, then develops a reading of them based on the intellectual context of this reception. A new preface and an appendix on vanguard biographies have been added to this paperback edition.

Firmat explores the process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban national identity.