JOINT BOOK LAUNCH: AN EVENING WITH CRISTINA GARCIA AND ANA MENENDEZ

Books & Books and Miami Book Fair presents… AN EVENING WITH CRISTINA GARCIA AND ANA MENENDEZ discussing Vanishing Maps: A Novel and The Apartment: A Novel

Books & Books is thrilled to present an evening with Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez discussing their highly anticipated novels: Vanishing Maps (Knopf, $28) and The Apartment (Counterpoint, $27).

This event is FREE and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase the night of the event! Please RSVP only if you intend to join us.

About Vanishing Maps:
From the acclaimed author of Dreaming in Cuban, a follow-up novel that tracks four generations of the del Pino family against the tumultuous backdrops of Cuba, the U.S., Germany, and Russia in the new millennium.

Celia del Pino, the matriarch of a far-flung Cuban family, has watched her descendants spread out across the globe, struggling to make sense of their transnational identities and strained relationships with one another. In Berlin, the charismatic yet troubled Ivanito performs on stage as his drag queen persona, while being haunted by the ghost of his mother. Pilar Puente, adrift in Los Angeles, is a struggling sculptor and the single mother of a young son. In Moscow, Ivanito’s cousin Irina has become the wealthy owner of a lingerie company, but she remains deeply lonely in the wake of her parents’ deaths and her estrangement from her Cuban heritage. Meanwhile, in Havana, Celia prepares to reunite with her lost lover, Gustavo, and wonders whether age and the decades spent apart have altered their bond.

Cut off from their Cuban roots, yet still feeling the island’s ineluctable pull, Ivanito and his extended family try to reimagine where—and with whom—they belong. Over the course of a momentous year, each will grapple with their histories as they are pulled to Berlin for a final, explosive reunion.

Set twenty years after the events in Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina García’s new novel is an epic tale of family, devotion, and the timeless search for home.

About The Apartment:
From the critically acclaimed author of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd comes a new novel about the search for freedom and the power of community that spans decades of residents in one Florida apartment

The Helena is an art deco apartment building that has witnessed the changing face of South Miami Beach for seventy years, observing the lives housed within. Among those who have called apartment 2B home are a Cuban concert pianist who performs in a nursing home; the widow of an intelligence officer raising her young daughter alone; a man waiting on a green card marriage to run its course so that he can divorce his wife and marry his lover, all of whom live together; a Tajik building manager with a secret identity; and a troubled young refugee named Lenin. Each tenant imbues 2B with energy that will either heal or overwhelm its latest resident, Lana, a mysterious woman struggling with her own past.

Examining exile, homesickness, and displacement, The Apartment asks what—in our violent and lonely century—do we owe one another? If alone we are powerless before sorrow and isolation, it is through community and the sharing of our stories that we may survive and persevere.

About the Authors:
CRISTINA GARCÍA is the author of eight novels including Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba and Here in Berlin. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fifteen languages. She’s taught at universities nationwide and is currently resident playwright at Central Works Theater in Berkeley.

ANA MENÉNDEZ has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!; The Last War; Loving Che; and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, most recently as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India. Her work has appeared in Vogue, BOMB, The New York Times, and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. She has a BA in English from Florida International University and an MFA from New York University. From 2008 to 2009, she lived in Cairo as a Fulbright Scholar. She has also lived in India, Turkey, Slovakia, and the Netherlands, where she designed a creative writing minor at Maastricht University in 2011. She is currently an associate professor at Florida International University with joint appointments in English and the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab.