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A novel set in Havana, a new set of poets laureate for Massachusetts, and the return of the Nantucket Literary Festival with a virtual Juneteenth panel Nina MacLaughlin
Cuban memories
Dariel Suarez’s taut and propulsive debut novel, “The Playwright’s House” (Red Hen), set in present-day Cuba, begins with Seguey’s father, an acclaimed theater director, getting arrested under shadowy circumstances. Seguey, a lawyer who ascended out of the grimmer conditions in which he and his brother Victor grew up, sets about trying to figure out what’s happened, and what he can do to solve it. In the process, he begins to operate on his own accord, “forced himself to act instead of calculate, to viscerally take a stance.” Suarez, author of the award-winning short fiction collection “A Kind of Solitude” and education director at Grub Street, makes Havana’s texture palpable, its streets, rooftops, sodas, its energy, contradictions, and the everpresent force