Firefly

"Sarduy is the master of wordscapes that dip, shake, and explode."-- The New York Times Book Review For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, "paradisic by plenitude" (Roland Barthes). Severo Sarduy(1937-1993) was a Cuban poet, author, playwright, and literary critic, as well as a leading intellectual in the Cuban Revolution. His novel Cobrawas awarded the Prix Medicis.

Severo Sarduy (1937-1993), Cuban poet, fiction writer, playwright, and literary critic, is considered one of the best prose artists of the twentieth century. In 1972, he was awarded the Prix Médicis for Cobra, one of his six highly acclaimed novels. Sarduy also painted, hosted a radio program, and, as an editor at Editions du Seuil, introduced contemporary Latin American fiction to European readers. Sarduy was a leading intellectual in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

Mark Fried is the translator of Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the Days, Mirrors, Voices of Time, Upside Down, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Walking Words, and We Say No. He is also the translator of the historical collection Echoes of the Mexican-American War and works by Emilia Ferreiro, José Ignacio López Vigil, Oscar Ugarteche and Rafael Barajas Durán.