Robert Arellano – författare

One hungry, hallucinatory night in the dark heart of Havana, Mano Rodriguez, a young doctor with the revolutionary medical service, comes to the aid of a teenage jinetera named Julia. She takes refuge in his clinic to break away from the abusive chulo who prostituted her, and they form an unlikely allegiance that Mano thinks might save him from his twin burdens: the dead-end hospital assignment he was delegated after being blacklisted by the Cuban Communist Party and a Palo Monte curse on his love life commissioned by a vengeful ex-wife. But when the pimp and his bodyguards come after Julia and Mano, the violent chain-reaction plunges them all into the decadent catacombs of Havana's criminal underworld.Inspired by fifty years of Cuban literary noir, from Cold Tales by Virgilio Piñera to Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls, Robert Arellano’s Havana Lunar intertwines an insider testimony on the collapse of socialist Cuba with a psychological mystery.

One of Deckled Edge Books's "5 Books With Diverse Perspectives You Can Read Today""In this unsettling mix of noir and paranormal obsession . . . Arellano displays a sly, Hitchcockian touch."--Publishers Weekly"Arellano pulls off the not-inconsiderable feat of making the disintegration of his hero more compelling than the end of the world as we know it."--Kirkus Reviews". . . [N]othing in New Mexico has ever been more secret than Los Alamos, the Atomic City, where a diverse group of geniuses built the first atomic bombs and changed the face of the world forever. That’s the setting and premise for this excellent novel by Cuban-American Robert Arellano. Disaster is about to happen and one man can avert it . . . maybe."--Globe and Mail (Canada)"Arellano's taut prose [is] a trip into the mind of a man on the edge of delirium, piecing together a puzzle at the expense of his marriage and his sanity."--AARP"Arellano writes with pure movement and action . . . Curse the Names does exactly what Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone did so well. It takes the ordinary, the benign and relatable and turns it into a fast-paced romp with unexpected events and realizations at every turn. Don’t be surprised if you start this book and don’t look up again until you’re finished. Though its release has come at the doorstep of 2012, Arellano has definitely earned a late addition to my best books of 2011."--Ryan W. Bradley, The Nervous Breakdown"Readers, fasten your seat belts for this one. Arellano’s novel is a dizzying Thompsonian concoction of noir crime thriller and alternately nightmarish and comic surreal psychodrama, spiced up with a heaping handful of local northern New Mexico flavor."--Albuquerque Journal"The nightmare intensity to Arellano's prose gets under your skin. You won't want to turn the lights out after reading it."--Charles Ardai, Edgar Award winnerHigh on a mesa in the mountains of New Mexico, a small town hides a dreadful secret. On a morning very soon there will be an accident that triggers a terrible chain reaction, and the world we know will be wiped out.James Oberhelm, a reporter at Los Alamos National Laboratory, already sees the devastation, like the skin torn off a moment that is yet to be. He believes he can prevent an apocalypse, but first James must escape the devices of a sensuous young blood tech, a lecherous old hippie, a predator in a waking nightmare, and a forsaken adobe house high away in the Sangre de Cristo mountains whose dark history entwines them all.A massive bomb is ticking beneath the sands of the Southwest, and time is running out to send a warning. James has to find a way to pass along the message--even if it ruins him.

A tale of political downfall from “an exceptional creative talent perfectly in tune with his own rapidly changing times” (Robert Coover, bestselling author of The Public Burning).   In 2002, real-life mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, Vincent “Buddy” Cianci was convicted of extortion. This is the story of Don “Pally” Dimaio, mayor of La Plata, as his corrupt administration spirals out of control.   From the award-winning author of Curse the Names and Fast Eddie, King of the Bees, this is a wildly inventive satirical novel that toggles between adaptations of the language of Cervantes and a narrative of an American mayor’s quixotic decline.

In this "exquisitely made thriller" by the author of Havana Lunar, a Cuban doctor is caught up in a web of espionage and international crime (Booklist). During the summer of 1997, a series of bombings terrorize Havana hotels. The targets are tourists, and the terrorists are exiles seeking to cripple Cuban tourism and kill the revolution. After Dr. Mano Rodriguez finds himself helpless to save one of the victims, his nemesis Colonel Emilio Pérez of the National Revolutionary Police recruits him into Havana''s top-secret Wasp Network of spies for an undercover job in the most dangerous city in Latin America: Miami . . . "Action [and] rich landscapes of daily life in Cuba during the special period, including blackouts, food shortages, the intricacies of conversation under an authoritarian government, and the craftiness of locals who offer guided tours to tourists for money—all details from over a decade of Arellano''s journals from his trips in the ''90s." —Miami New Times "A remarkably powerful narrative. The interrogation scene repulses while it grips . . . but readers are advised to stay with it for a rich reading experience." —Booklist, starred review "Arellano''s world of clinic doctors, hotel hustlers, secret police, and neighborhood spies is as rich and vibrant a place as I''ve come across in fiction in a long while. His style has something of Bolaño''s cynical, madcap energy, but with Graham Greene''s eye for the small absurdities in life, the same absurdities that, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, spin out into an international catastrophe." —Literary Hub