The Mystery of Fiction: An Interview with Ana Menendez
by Melissa Scholes Young
From the Archives: Ana Menéndez’s story collection Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves.
From the Archives: Ana Menéndez’s story collection Adios, Happy Homeland! shadows people on the run from their circumstances and themselves.
“I think it takes a greater creative leap to attempt to throw yourself into a stranger and try to make sense of him or her in a way that often makes sense of yourself too”: Michelle Hoover and Allison Amend discuss their latest novels and the difficulties of writing fiction based on historical fact.
This week’s feature is Ana Menendez’s new story collection, Adios, Happy Homeland!, which was published by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic. Her first collection of stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, was a 2001 New York Times Notable book of the year and the title story won a Pushcart Prize. In addition to her other books—Loving Che (2004) and The Last War (2009)—she’s worked as a journalist and prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. Now Menendez is establishing a creative writing program at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She lives in Amsterdam and Miami. In […]
Chloe Aridjis’s first novel, Book of Clouds (Black Cat, 2009), proves an immensely pleasurable and thought-provoking read. Tatiana, whose father owns the largest Jewish deli in Mexico City, finds herself still living in Berlin long after winning a year there from the Goethe Institute. As a self-professed “professional in lost time,” Tatiana may challenge writer-readers’ assumptions about good characterization. And yet the novel succeeds and keeps us engaged in not only Tatiana, but in the novel’s real main character: the city of Berlin.
