Bøker av Barbara de la Cuesta

"Art gotta be high up and dangerous," the graffiti artist tells his mother. It has to be practiced diligently like playing the piano, the longtime members of a life drawing studio believe, and if your view of the model is the model's backside, you don't move for a better view. Art is a mysterious way into your model's sorrow when words fail. Art can open the rooms of your childhood. It existed before there was perspective. It can even be a dinner party. It can make a still life come alive, and it can heal a wounded spirit. Barbara de la Cuesta taught and worked as a journalist in South America. She now teaches Spanish. Her novel, The Spanish Teacher, was winner of the Gival Press Fiction Prize. About her most recent novel, Adam's Chair, Lauren Stafford, of the Manhattan Review of Books, wrote: "A tapestry of literary elegance... A contemporary novel for the ages."

Adam's Chair is a narrative of one day in 1981 in Waltham Massachusetts. The shuttle, Columbia, orbits above. An elderly French Canadian escapes his sleeping wife and makes his way to Mt. Feake Cemetery before dawn, whose neighborhoods reflect the city's own, its waves of immigration. Priscilla, a home health aide, college dropout, and socialist since she turned sixteen, rides her bicycle to work at dawn. She gives baths, gives an English lesson, and reflects on the city whose founders included her ancestors, on her divorce, a hickey on her daughter's neck... The mayor visits The Sunshine Club. The shuttle sends down messages...---"...shakes up any conceived notion of what a contemporary work should be... challenging me to step outside of my comfort zone... I found beneath the surface a whole new world...The way their individual strands stick out, and yet, at the same time, blend together, created such a beautiful work of tapestry of literary elegance.You must have an open mind and a ready heart for this ... contemporary novel of the ages and a soon-to-be classic..."-- Lauren Stafford, The Manhattan Review of Books

Barbara de la Cuesta's novella, The Mists, is a fascinating read. The characters are pulled into the midst of conflict and self awareness in the misty mountains of Central America. The reader is whole-heartedly pulled into the minds and hearts of de la Cuesta's characters. -Leah Huete de Maines

In this narrative prose poem, Priscilla, home health aide, college dropout, social activist, sets out to work on her bicycle at dawn. Passing the old woolen mill, she meditates on the city's history and her family's part in its founding. As she visits her clients in their apartments, the space shuttle Columbia orbits above, sending down messages, the mayor visits the Sunshine Club, a parachutist lands in Leary Field, an AA meeting takes place in the basement of the Italian Church… Evening comes. Priscilla feeds her children. Called back to work, she suffers a long-feared bicycle accident, is taken overnight to the hospital where she has some ecstatic and revelatory thoughts about her survival. Dawn comes, the shuttle lands.

"There were little sins and big sins, and if you committed too many little sins you were more likely to go on to the big ones. Some sins you did in your mind and then, sometimes, you went on to let yourself fall into them."Darkly witty and compulsively readable, Barbara de la Cuesta's novella lets us into the private life and secret thoughts of Rosa, an undocumented home health aide grappling with menopause and her unruly body, unexpected romance, grown children who alternately worry her and fill her with pride, and how life is confronting her with everything she has ever denied herself or hidden away from. Rosa is a natural storyteller, insightful in hindsight about her own motivations and unflinching in her willingness to look at the girl she was and the woman she has become. Rosa is a daring, funny, and emotional story about a woman moving her life out of the margins and into the sun with the power of confession.

Praise for Barbara de la Cuesta's previous novel, The Spanish Teacher, winner of the Gival Press Novel Prize... "The Spanish Teacher has everything to thrill you-pace, a great balance of description, gesture and action, charmed, perfectly tuned dialogue, and most notably, a character we follow as closely and sympathetically as if we were living right there inside the story with him…rarely do we see a full drama like this, where every bit of the writing extends from, grows out of, is part and parcel with the author's complete realization of and connection to her character…" -Don Berger, judge for the Gival Press Novel Award "…de la Cuesta's novel maintains an accumulating power which holds the reader's attention not only through the forceful figure of Ordóñez, but by demonstrating acutely how ordinary lives are impacted by the underlying social and political landscape. Compelling reading." -Tom Tolnay, author of Selling America and This Is the Forest Primeval