Anna Lidia Vega Serova, ‘Imperio doméstico’
“The House, I am the House. More than stone and fence, more than shadow and earth, more than roof and wall, for I am all of these things, and I am with soul.” (Dulce María Loynaz)
Rooms where cobwebs guard secrets, walls that overhear moans and arguments, kitchens where desires and grudges come to the boil. This is Imperio doméstico, Anna Lidia Vega Serova’s acclaimed short story collection, a new Spanish edition of which Amaurea Press has just published. Anna Lidia Vega Serova transforms the everyday into a territory of excess, impulses and ghosts, with a prose that is fierce, sensual and uncompromising. Stories that uncover the hidden side of intimacy: love as a battlefield, the home as a trench, the body as a stage for power and for loss.
Anna Lidia is one of Cuba’s most distinctive contemporary voices – a writer and visual artist, whose own artwork adorns the new edition’s cover. Born in Leningrad in 1968, to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, she settled definitively in Havana, Cuba, in 1989. In 1997 she won the Premio David for her first short-story collection, Bad Painting, and she has since become a celebrated figure in the Cuban literary scene, with eight short-story collections, three books of poetry and two novels. Through both her words and her painting, her work is noteworthy for its very personal reflection of daily life, grindingly yet magically real.
This new edition of Imperio doméstico opens with a powerful prologue by Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, whose own work has been celebrated for its explorations of Afro-Caribbean identity, feminism and queer desire. A prize-winning writer, poet and essayist, Yolanda has been recognised as one of the most important contemporary voices in Caribbean literature, exploring questions of race, sexuality and gender through fiction and activism. We are very pleased to share Yolanda’s prologue in English translation below, as an introduction to Vega Serova’s universe and to this remarkable book.
Prologue
by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (translated from the Spanish original)
Anna Lidia Vega Serova’s writing is a blade that cuts both from the Caribbean shore and the Russian backdrop that inhabits her. That double belonging – being a daughter of islands and of steppes – gives to her an unmistakable voice, one capable of blending violence with tenderness, artistic gesture with narrative drive. As a visual artist, poet and storyteller, Vega Serova does not confine herself to a single medium: in her work, the word spills into the image and the image returns to the word, in a constant cycle of transgression and reinvention.
In one of her most revealing fragments, she writes:
“I have filled the floor with letters. Next I will fill the walls, the ceilings and the very air. Without haste I go on writing the book of a house, probing its spaces and discovering stories, assembling chronicles of echoes, barely perceptible traces, and ghosts that wander indolently. Perhaps I lived some of them in a previous incarnation. Perhaps I invented them all.”
This poetics is also a declaration of principles: literature as the total occupation of space, as memory and hallucination, as exorcism of personal and collective spectres. In her hands, literature is not only text: it is inhabitable architecture, a sensory territory that forces us to stop, to look at the invisible and to listen to silences.
Vega Serova’s voice also belongs to a hybrid, revealing lineage. In it coexist the Russian backdrop and the Cuban experience, cold ancestral memory and the burning humidity of the tropics. This crossing of origins is not mere inheritance, but a transgressive gesture that allows her to defy cultural borders and reinvent what we mean by identity. From there, her literature becomes universal, in dialogue with the particular while proposing new ways to narrate the intimate, the social and the fantastic.
In Taller de expurgo, one of the most unsettling stories in this volume, we are introduced to a domestic ritual that soon transforms into a disturbing exercise in power, desire and contained violence. With a slow, obsessive rhythm, the story builds a tension between tenderness and cruelty, between caress and threat. The everyday scene of water, soap and skin becomes a space of erotic doubling where the promise of the razor blade pulses like a premonition. The tale exposes the fragility of bodies and the extreme impulses that cross them, in a macabre game where the intimate and the brutal merge without the possibility of redemption.
For my part, my favourite, A orillas del baño, presents a heartbreaking portrait of a couple of women whose shared life oscillates between the tenderness of everyday gestures and the violence of sudden outbursts. The bathtub, an object of desire and symbol of a shared dream, becomes the trigger for obsessions, jealousy and tragedy. With a halting style, almost breathed in sighs and silences, the text reveals how what is born of loving illusion can end drowned by the sadness and frustration of the impossible. In her writing, Vega Serova lets us glimpse that every gift may also be a trap, and that love, at times, is a broken mirror.
In Cáncer, the writer carries her poetics of transgression to an extreme threshold where eroticism and illness intertwine with disturbing rawness. The story probes illusions, impostures and the need to convert another’s pain into a source of pleasure, until death itself becomes both mirror and catalyst. The protagonist, trapped in a spiral of screams, ulcerated bodies and hospitals turned into secret temples of desire, embodies the brutal lucidity of a voice unafraid to confront the most abject in human experience. Vega Serova transforms the grotesque into literary substance, reminding us that writing, like sex, can be an act of expiation and of abyss.
This book now offered to us is a journey of possible reincarnations, of fictions that could be memories and of memories that could be pure invention.
“Perhaps I lived some of them in a previous incarnation. Perhaps I invented them all.”
That perhaps (doubt and certainty at once) guides us through pages vibrating with irony, lucidity and a desire to push literature towards its most fertile limits. Here is writing that, from the island and from the world, never ceases to expand like a tide of letters and colours.
The strength of her work lies precisely in this ability to move between the corporeal and the spiritual, the everyday and the phantasmagorical, without establishing fixed boundaries. Vega Serova writes as one who paints in oils and at the same time leaves traces in ashes; as one who recognises that the Caribbean, with its overflowing light, is also a territory of shadows and broken memories. Her narrative, as intimate as it is, is a form of emotional archaeology: it digs among the remains of the day to find proof that literature is still the only true refuge.
The work of Anna Lidia Vega Serova is an archipelago where word, line and image converge. In this new edition, the author opens a house of words where each wall, each fissure, each shadow becomes material for story. At the end, almost like a flash, she writes:
“Playing spin the bottle:
He: ‘What is your greatest aberration?’
Me: ‘Writing.’”
That confession, which seems like a game, works as a mantra to understand her work as a whole. Writing as aberration, as inevitable destiny, as an act that asks no permission and insists on repeating itself even if it hurts, even if it does not save. That is how Anna Lidia Vega Serova reaches us: with the certainty that in her writing the abject turns to beauty. Her pen is that bottle spinning in the middle of the room: chance and condemnation, desire and sentence, game and oracle.
Earlier this year, Amaurea Press published the first English edition of Anna Lidia’s novel Anima Fatua translated by Robin Munby, which received a PEN Translates award from English PEN . We are also preparing the first English edition (translated by Jennifer Shyue) of her personal anthology, Estirpe de papel. This is set to be published in September 2026. This brings together selections from across her career. Amaurea has previously published Anna Lidia’s Un Jardín en Miniatura/A Miniature Garden (a Spanish/English bilingual edition of her poetry) and Sideways Glance (an English translation of Anna Lidia’s Mirada de reojo).