Castro's communist regime gained control of Cuba in 1959, sparking a surge of immigration to the United States, particularly Miami, as refugees sought a better life. But for many, Cuba will always be home. The island's stories pass from refugee to refugee, immigrant to grandchild, mingling hope for the future with grief for what's lost. Yet these stories also pass down a deep, unconscious desire for the unattainable, which often results in fractured relationships and a loss of purpose for both young and old. Grieving for Guava revels in the unbroken ties between past and future, Havana and Miami, and recounts the unintended generational costs of immigration. Ten stories explore the lives of Cuban refugees in Miami as they grapple with a longing for the past and a fervent need to move forward. Spanning six decades of the Cuban exile, these stories lay bare a collective struggle to overcome the destabilizing effects of migration and to reassemble splintered identities: A journalist returns to the island for a childhood toy. An investment banker leaves Miami to open a bookstore near the Malecon. A girl with cerebral palsy attempts to swim across the ocean to reach her lost home. Cecilia Fernandez artfully weaves together the complicated lives of her characters to produce an overarching sense of yearning for the past, transforming grief into an even more powerful force: communion. Grieving for Guava captures the heartache and hope that are common in the immigrant experience, adding a dynamic, human voice to the politically charged dialogue surrounding immigration.

While running along the seawall that borders Nipe Bay in the sugar mill town of Preston, Cuba, three Cuban children, Lina, Emilio, and Angela find a waterlogged suitcase. They soon learn the bag is debris from a tragic plane crasha failed hijacking. Two months later, thousands of Fidel Castros supporters are shouting Viva Fidel! as the new leader addresses the nation on TV and radio. As the revolution engulfs the island, the childrens families take sides and take action. Fearing their friendships will be torn apart, the playmates vow to be friends forever. Soon Lina is sent to her grandparents in the United States. With the help of a semi-clandestine operation, Operation Pedro Pan, Emilio goes to a childrens home in Miami. Angela stays in Cuba and joins the Army of Education. As the three families struggle with tragedies and betrayal, Lina determines to reunite with her friends.

An Entertainment Weekly Pick of Summer’s Best New Books Wren’s closest friend, her anchor since childhood, is dead. Stewart Beasley. Gone. She can’t quite believe it and she definitely can’t bring herself to google what causes an aneurysm. Instead of weeping or facing reality, Wren has been dreaming up the perfect funeral plans, memorial buffets, and processional songs for everyone from the corner bodega owner to her parents (none of whom show signs of imminent demise). Stewart was a rising TV star, who—for reasons Wren struggles to understand—often surrounded himself with sycophants, amusing in his life, but intolerable in his death. When his icy mother assigns Wren the task of disseminating his possessions alongside George (Stewart’s maddening, but oddly charming lawyer), she finds herself at the epicenter of a world in which she wants no part, where everyone is competing to own a piece of Stewart’s memory (sometimes literally). Remembering the boy Stewart was and investigating the man he became, Wren finds herself wondering, did she even know this person who she once considered an extension of herself? Can you ever actually know anyone? How well does she really know herself? Through laughter and tears, Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving shines a light on the universal struggle to grieve amidst the noise, to love with a broken heart, and to truly know someone who is gone forever.

A girl afflicted with pyrokinesis tries to control her fire-starting long enough to go to a dance with a boy she likes. A woman trapped in a stalled marriage is excited by an alluring ex-con who enrolls in her YMCA cooking class. A teen accompanies her mother, a prestigious poet, to a writing conference where she navigates a misguided attraction to a married writer—who is, in turn, attracted to her mother—leaving her "inventing punishments for writers who believe in clichés as tired as broken hearts." In this affecting collection, Katie Cortese explores the many faces of love and desire. Featuring female narrators that range in age from five to forty, the narratives in Make Way for Her speak to the many challenges and often bittersweet rewards of offering, receiving, and returning love as imperfect human beings. The stories are united by the theme of desperate love, whether it's a daughter's love for a parent, a sister's for a sibling, or a romantic love that is sometimes returned and sometimes unrequited. Cortese's complex and multilayered stories play with the reader's own desires and anticipations as her characters stubbornly resist the expected. The intrepid girls and women in this book are, above all, explorers. They drive classic cars from Maine to Phoenix, board airplanes for the first time, and hike dense forests in search of adventure; but what they often find is that the most treacherous landscapes lie within. As a result, Make Way for Her explores a world of women who crave knowledge and experience, not simply sex or love.

Manding is a common name for several closely related languages in West Africa: Maninka (or Malinke), Bamana (or Bambara), Jula, Mandinka, Xasonka, etc., spoken by up to 40 million people. In this dictionary, forms of Malian Bamana and Guinean Maninka are included. The polysemy of words is represented in all details, the senses are represented hierarchically. Verbal valencies are indicated throughout and clarified by abundant illustrative examples. Numerous idiomatic expressions are given. Most of lexemes are provided with etymological information: sources of borrowing or proto-forms and their reflexes in other Mande languages. The dictionary is oriented toward advanced language learners and professional linguists, but it can be also useful for native speakers of Bamana and Maninka languages.

A lyrical exploration of love and loss, this book centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern Black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive. The author offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love - and love that's handed down - can conquer.

The twelve stories in this anthology are some of the most riveting narratives penned by Macario Pineda in a writing career that lasted for less than two decades. Retold in English by Ms. Soledad S. Reyes, Macario Pineda’s Love in the Rice Fields and Other Short Stories offer readers a series of scenes in which various characters come alive in their respective journeys through life’s various stages—the idyllic innocence of youth, the pleasure and agony of young love, the disillusionment of old age, and the experience of death. Each story slowly leads its characters to an epiphany, for example, of the unconditional nature of a mother’s love, of war and its evils, of death and what possibly transpires after. In this collection of short stories, Pineda is the consummate chronicler of the barrio, a gentle historian, a masterful painter, a great Filipino artist who painstakingly depicted the varied aspects of the past he loved—an age slowly disappearing from the consciousness of most Filipinos in a world slowly deteriorating due to colonialism and its aftermath.