Read the whole book (in Spanish)
About the book
For unknown reasons, Don Quixote and his inseparable Sancho Panza, just as they charge the famous windmills of chapter eight of the original novel, are caught up by a gale and land in the capital of a Caribbean island, some time in the 1990s. A young poet takes the eminent knight into his home and, armed with magic and poetry, does everything he can to right that wrong.
Such is the beginning of this singular adventure story, which won First Prize in the Reescribir El Quijote en Cuba competition, held in 2005 by the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and the Embassy of Spain in Cuba. Now Editorial Cubaliteraria publishes it for the first time on the island, in digital form, as an EPUB.
In my own words
After many years, and books in Cuba can take that long and longer to be published, my wish to have a Cuban edition of this text was at last fulfilled. As I have said elsewhere, this story won First Prize in the Reescribir El Quijote en Cuba competition in 2005, held by the Embassy of Spain in Cuba and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Although an anthology of the prizes and mentions was published in Spain, every writer wishes, perhaps not to be a prophet, but at least to be read in his own land. So, after much rowing, nearly two decades of acceptances, oversights and silent postponements, the book was published in digital form at home. It turned out to be the first of this author's titles to appear in that new form.
Despite the poor connections and other trials of the Cuban internet, readers did at last reach the book. Others, thanks to copies the writer sent directly, have joined in the reading, with the occasional word of praise. Once again, and fortunately, opinions on this literary divertimento have been kind, for which I am grateful. Another triumph was the lovely gesture of the cover illustration, a gift from my inimitable Iván Batista. Thank you for that birth, and for that Quixote and Sancho made of pure real life and, at the same time, fantastic.
Among the guardian angels of my literary life, some tangible and real, others loving but distant, and others simply imagined or dreamed, is without doubt the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. I thank Don Quixote, and his earthly Sancho Panza, for agreeing to travel my pages for a while. They have been with me ever since. Thank you for those roads revealed; we keep walking.
ALS
Launches and signings
Details
- title
- De la extraña aventura de Don Quijote por lejanas tierras y otros sucesos hasta hoy olvidados (Of the Strange Adventure of Don Quixote in Distant Lands, and Other Events Forgotten Until Now)
- genre
- Fiction
- publisher
- Editorial Cubaliteraria
- year
- 2021
- format
- EPUB
- cover
- Illustration by Iván Batista
- origin
- From the first prize of the Reescribir El Quijote en Cuba competition, 2005
- rights
- Available for editions and translations outside Cuba. Rights enquiries · derechos@antoniolopezsanchez.art