Dainerys Machado Vento

A powerful voice has arrived that offers a portrait as angry as it is entrancing of today's Cuba.

Women of all ages and social classes parade through the different Havanas in these stories. Dissatisfied, obdurate, desirous women. Women hooked on rum and porn. Women who desperately want to dance wildly all night at the disco and make out with strangers. Women who hate their mothers because they are always right, their husbands because they can’t get it up, and their mother-in-laws because they never approve of anything they cook. Women with an inner volcano about to erupt at any moment. 

In her first book, with its irresistible foul-mouthed prose and bullet-proof irony, Dainerys Machado reveals herself to be one of the most irresistible voices of the new Latin American literature. She is one of the authors appearing in the Granta anthology published this year.   

“Acid humour, in the style of Virgilio Piñera, lemonade with very little sugar to cope with the island’s sticky heat. […] This book is a testimony about the rise and fall of a town, a wake and a party. Singing and weeping, celebration and burial, but not forgetting." Vice-Versa Magazine