Cecilia Valdes, one of the jewels of nineteenth-century Latin American fiction, displays a thematic complexity that is unique among the novels of its time. Cecilia, the alluring mulata, has come to represent the survival strategies of women of color in a racist society. The novel occupies a prominent place in post-colonial studies about social stratification according to skin color in plantation societies. Villaverde's novel shows the process of modernization that resulted from the boom in the sugar industry, and the transformation of Havana and its social dynamics. The spaces through which the narrator leads us are the same spaces where the story of Cecilia and the history of Havana unfold in parallel lines. A close reading of the novel corroborates the often reiterated perception that Cecilia -alluring, hybrid, complex and tempestuous- is Havana, and is Cuba.

"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"(Ruben Martinez 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 a clef, Fantoches blurs 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, Guillen, Abela and Enriquez. 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.

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 Rodriguez Monegal.