The Color of Summer by Reinaldo Arenas

The Color of Summer by Reinaldo Arenas

Critics worldwide have praised Reinaldo Arenas's writing. His extraordinary memoir, Before Night Falls, was named one of the fourteen "Best Books of 1993" by the editors of The New York Times Book Review and has now been made into a major motion picture.

The Color of Summer, Arenas's finest comic achievement, is also the fulfillment of his life's work, the Pentagonia, a five-volume cycle of novels he began writing in his early twenties. Although it is the penultimate installment in his "secret history of Cuba," it was, in fact, the last book Arenas wrote before his death in 1990. A Rabelaisian tale of survival by wits and wit, The Color of Summer is ultimately a powerful and passionate story about the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of political and sexual repression.

Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943. In the 1970s, he was imprisoned multiple times for being gay, which clashed with the beliefs of the Communist regime. Despite the hardships imposed during his imprisonment, Arenas produced a significant body of work, including his Pentagonia, a set of five novels written between the 1960s and 1980s that comprise a secret history of post-revolutionary Cuba: Singing from the Well, Farewell to the Sea, Palace of the White Skunks, Color of Summer, and The Assault. In 1980, he was one of 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift. Arenas, ill with AIDS, committed suicide in 1990 shortly after completing Before Night Falls.

Thomas Colchie is an acclaimed translator, editor, and literary agent for international authors. He is the editor of A Hammock Beneath the Mangoes. He has written for the Village Voice and The Washington Post. His translations include Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman and (with Elizabeth Bishop, Gregory Rabassa, and Mark Strand) Carlos Drummond de Andrade's Travelling in the Family.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780140157192
ISBN 10	0140157190
Title	The Color of Summer
Author	Reinaldo Arenas
Series	Pentagonia
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Random House Australia
Year published	2001-06-01
Number of pages	496
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.