“I like things that are messy,” says Achy Obejas. “The conventional detective story seems to seek out a way of making order in the world, and I’m much more interested in the disorder in the world—living among the disorder and making sense of it on a daily basis.”
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Novelist, poet, and longtime Tribune reporter (she won a Pulitzer in 2001 as part of the team behind a series about the nation’s air-travel system), Obejas was six in 1963, when she and her parents left Cuba on a boat bound for Miami—a bit of biography snappily summed up in the title of her 1994 short-story collection, We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? The novel that followed, Memory Mambo, played with knotty questions of identity and family, its protagonist—like Obejas—a Cuban-born lesbian living in Chicago.
Obejas had met Akashic publisher Johnny Temple in 1999 or 2000—she can’t quite remember, but it was before the publication of her 2001 novel, Days of Awe—and they’d bonded over a dinner followed by “many, many drinks” at the Green Mill. But they didn’t work together directly until 2005, when Obejas—who was living in Honolulu—picked up a copy of Miami Noir and was aghast to find only one Cuban writer in the collection. “You can’t walk down the street in Miami without tripping over five Cuban writers in a block!” she says. When she razzed Temple about it, suggesting that he put together a Havana Noir anthology, he suggested in turn that she do the job.
The book’s publication has brought some unexpected benefits to Obejas. Temple has enlisted her to translate stories for the forthcoming Mexico City Noir and Barcelona Noir into English, and, in a first, she’s translating Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao into Spanish. She got the job on the basis of an anonymous audition. (“I loved [Obejas’s submission] because it was so much more supple and alive than the other samples,” says Diaz. “Then it turned out to be my friend and I was floored.”)
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