RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksShowcasing Menéndez’s signature sensuous language, dreamlike imagery, ambitious experimentation, and political awareness honed by her decades as an award-winning journalist, The Apartment is a tour de force by an author working at the peak of her powers ... Plumbs the depths of existential, life-and-death questions ... Menéndez opens her narrative with Indigeneity, restoring to literary view Miami’s inhabitants who long preceded Spanish conquest. In so doing, she problematizes the dominant Western concept of linear time. Elegiac, the novel begins with a scene not long before the moment of colonial conquest.
Alba de Céspedes trans. Ann Goldstein
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksDe Céspedes could have easily written a book that spanned a much broader canvas ... She deliberately used the vehicle of the domestic novel to explore issues of class, gender, and war ... Forbidden Notebook’s pace is quick, propulsive, and addictive. Intimate, smart, and smoldering, newly translated by Ann Goldstein... Forbidden Notebook joins a global canon of work... unapologetically restricting its focus to the world of traditionally feminine concerns—home, family, romance, the convulsive desire for a prettier hat—while subtly engaging political issues and capturing an almost mystical, transcendently luminous awareness.
