Daína Chaviano (Author)

A case in point is Daína Chaviano, who for nearly two decades has been Cuba's leading writer of fantasy and science fiction (though she's lived in Miami since 1991), winning numerous awards, becoming perhaps the most translated Cuban writer ever, and gaining a strong enough international reputation to be invited as guest of honor at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2004. Yet except for a single story included in the 2003 Wesleyan University Press anthology Cosmos Latinos, her work has remained all but invisible to English readers until now. The Island of Eternal Love ("La isla de los amores infinitos" in its original 2006 edition) is the fourth in a series of novels that Chaviano has collectively called "The Occult Side of Havana", and while it comes to us deservedly bearing the mantle of Magic Realism, it's also clearly the work of an author who's comfortable with fantasy, and not afraid to drop allusions to Tolkien or Lovecraft. (Complete text in PDF).