Books published by StockCERO

Acclaimed by the initiated, Felisberto Hernandez has long been considered «a writer''s writer, more admired by his colleagues than known by the public at large» (Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Yale University).As with his predecessors in the «genre of the strange» Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, the apparent eccentricities in Felisberto Hernandez''s stories create a coherent system of allusions and correspondences, a system that reaches its summit in masterpieces such as «Las Hortensias» and «La casa inundada».As Hoffmann, who preceded him, and Cortazar, who followed, Felisberto turned away from the literary trends of his times and departed on his own journey, undertaking the task of redefining the human being and replacing the accepted notion of material reality with what he called «the mystery»: small and deep daily realities that fall outside an ever narrowing focus on the homogenous and utilitarian.A trained musician and composer, Felisberto elaborated his literary compositions as musical structures, based on the relations among notes and phrases. Thus, Felisberto Hernandez''s short stories cannot be approached and read as isolated pieces if the reader intends to grasp the complexity lying deep below the surface.In this edition Ana Maria Hernandez -who bears the same name as Felisbertos'' second daughter and teaches Advanced Spanish Composition at CUNY- analyzes the gradual development of Felisberto''s theory and praxis of composition by commenting on his most representative short stories and emphasizing the intertextuality of the recurring symbols and themes throughout his literary production.
This approach transforms this edition in an exceptional basis for Creative Writing and Advanced Spanish Composition courses, exposing students to texts that exerted a noticeable influence upon acclaimed writers such as Julio Cortazar -his biggest fan- Juan Carlos Onetti, and Italo Calvino, and provoked one of the biggest critical blunders by the otherwise sharp critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal.

"But, unfortunately, such is Havana. It is impossible to change its condition as a port, as a crossroad, or its cosmopolitism, its vicious immigration, its propitiatory hiding places, its mixture of races, its fiery sun, all that diabolical entanglement of factors and circumstances that is here, amongst us, the board where the shady games of love and hatred are played"(Rubén Martínez Villena, 68).Throughout 1926, the literary journal Social publishes the detection narrative Fantoches (Puppets), a collective endeavor of eleven writers and eleven illustrators associated with the Grupo Minorista. Halfway between a Surrealist collective improvisation and a British detective novel, Fantoches 1926 is a unique creation, a confluence of intellectual currents that combine the innovations of the European avant-grade and autochthonous socio-political movements during the early Cuban Republic. An irreverent work influenced by the British sensation novels and the French romans à clef, Fantochesblurs the boundaries that separate fiction from reality by featuring writers as characters and by incorporating analytical essays into the plot. The inclusion of digressions about Cuba's African heritage anticipates the mature works of writers and artists from the thirties such as Carpentier, Guillén, Abela and Enríquez.This edition, gleaned from the issues of Social in the collection of the New York Public Library, reproduces the illustrations and typographical ornamentations from the original. Editorial changes have been kept to a minimum, modernizing the spelling of fue, vio, dio and other monosyllabic words, and standardizing the spelling of some names that vary among authors. On a few occasions, unusual spellings that were interpreted as typographical errors ("vendabal" for "vendaval"; "Brocadero" for "Trocadero") were changed. The original subtitle "A Modern Novel by Twelve Cuban Writers" was changed to "Eleven Cuban Writers" since the same author, Carlos Loveira, writes the first and the last chapters.

In republishing Excéntricas (1893) not only will we recover Bonifacio Byrne's most important volume of poetry, but also one of the most important titles of Cuban modernism, and one which will certainly enrich the canon of Spanish-American modernismo.This is both a critical and carefully commented edition of Excéntricas and other selections of Byrne's poetry and prose, which also includes an updated bibliography and a survey of critical approaches to his poetry. The edition also features a rigorous introduction that introduces the author to the reader, places the poet in the context of his time and brings to light his singularity as a modernista poet.Francisco Morán, professor of Spanish-American literature at Southern Methodist University is the editor of this volume. Prof. Morán, who has published extensively on the main figures of modernism, was in charge of the edition of Juana Borrero o la obsesión del obstáculo, also published by Stockcero.