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Darkly comic stories of desire, betrayal and the dangerous intimacy of everyday life
27 unsettling tales of women's lives, love and survival from one of Cuba's most distinctive voices in realismo sucio
PAPER LINEAGES
Anna Lidia Vega Serova
Translated by Jennifer Shyue
Publication date: 20 May 2027
An erotic dream unsettles a woman's marriage. An unexpected inheritance plunges another into a nightmare of suspicion. A family history is told and retold through conflicting accounts of love, betrayal and abandonment. In Anna Lidia Vega Serova's fiction, the most familiar relationships can become the most dangerous.
Moving between the streets and cramped apartments of Havana and the remembered landscapes of the former Soviet Union, Paper Lineages brings together twenty-seven stories of desire, obsession, cruelty and survival. Mothers and daughters, lovers and strangers struggle to make sense of their lives and of one another. Tenderness gives way to violence, memories dissolve into invention, and the ordinary becomes disturbingly strange.
An important voice in Cuban realismo sucio (dirty realism) and the country's bold tradition of women's and queer writing, Vega Serova combines a painter's eye for detail with savage humour and an unflinching understanding of human weakness. Her characters are neither straightforward victims nor heroes: they are passionate, defiant, selfish, vulnerable and insistently human.
For readers of Lucia Berlin, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Fernanda Melchor, Paper Lineages offers an unsettling, darkly comic encounter with one of Cuba's most distinctive contemporary writers.
Originally published in Spanish as Estirpe de papel, the collection appears in English for the first time in its entirety, translated by Jennifer Shyue with the support of an English PEN Translates award.
Themes: Cuban dirty realism • Women's lives and sexuality • Queer fiction • Dark humour and the grotesque • Family relationships and psychological conflict
Paper Lineages will be available in paperback and eBook editions
Anna Lidia Vega Serova was born in the former Soviet Union to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, and has lived in Havana since 1989. A writer and visual artist, she won the Premio David in 1997. Her books include the novel Anima Fatua, published in English by Amaurea Press; her stories have appeared in Guernica, Two Lines and Words Without Borders.
Jennifer Shyue translates from Spanish, specialising in contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian literature. Her translation of Augusto Higa Oshiro's The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu won the 2024 ALTA First Translation Prize. A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright fellowships, she has published translations of Vega Serova's stories in The Common, New England Review and American Chordata. The two have worked together for more than a decade.
Darkly comic stories of desire, betrayal and the dangerous intimacy of everyday life
27 unsettling tales of women's lives, love and survival from one of Cuba's most distinctive voices in realismo sucio
PAPER LINEAGES
Anna Lidia Vega Serova
Translated by Jennifer Shyue
Publication date: 20 May 2027
An erotic dream unsettles a woman's marriage. An unexpected inheritance plunges another into a nightmare of suspicion. A family history is told and retold through conflicting accounts of love, betrayal and abandonment. In Anna Lidia Vega Serova's fiction, the most familiar relationships can become the most dangerous.
Moving between the streets and cramped apartments of Havana and the remembered landscapes of the former Soviet Union, Paper Lineages brings together twenty-seven stories of desire, obsession, cruelty and survival. Mothers and daughters, lovers and strangers struggle to make sense of their lives and of one another. Tenderness gives way to violence, memories dissolve into invention, and the ordinary becomes disturbingly strange.
An important voice in Cuban realismo sucio (dirty realism) and the country's bold tradition of women's and queer writing, Vega Serova combines a painter's eye for detail with savage humour and an unflinching understanding of human weakness. Her characters are neither straightforward victims nor heroes: they are passionate, defiant, selfish, vulnerable and insistently human.
For readers of Lucia Berlin, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Fernanda Melchor, Paper Lineages offers an unsettling, darkly comic encounter with one of Cuba's most distinctive contemporary writers.
Originally published in Spanish as Estirpe de papel, the collection appears in English for the first time in its entirety, translated by Jennifer Shyue with the support of an English PEN Translates award.
Themes: Cuban dirty realism • Women's lives and sexuality • Queer fiction • Dark humour and the grotesque • Family relationships and psychological conflict
Paper Lineages will be available in paperback and eBook editions
Anna Lidia Vega Serova was born in the former Soviet Union to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, and has lived in Havana since 1989. A writer and visual artist, she won the Premio David in 1997. Her books include the novel Anima Fatua, published in English by Amaurea Press; her stories have appeared in Guernica, Two Lines and Words Without Borders.
Jennifer Shyue translates from Spanish, specialising in contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian literature. Her translation of Augusto Higa Oshiro's The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu won the 2024 ALTA First Translation Prize. A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright fellowships, she has published translations of Vega Serova's stories in The Common, New England Review and American Chordata. The two have worked together for more than a decade.
