“Achy Obejas writes like an angel: flush with power, vision and hope … one of the Caribbean’s most important writers.”
Junot Diaz, author of Drown, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Achy Obejas, author of “We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” and “Memory Mambo” (stories of Cuban Americans in 
Chicago), spins disjointed dreams into tangible things through her poetry and prose. And come this month, the Chicagoan has released another book of dreams, entitled “Ruins”. “Ruins”, set to be released on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, bears echoes of Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” reset during the “special period” in Cuba. The main character is “Usnavy”, a dig on the American military’s longsuffering relationship with Cubans. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Obejas feels she will eventually leave Chicago to settle permanently into Cuba (she left with her family when she was six). She recently told Cafe Magazine, “I live in Chicago, with an ever-diminishing Cuban-American community and far from the Miami epicenter. I am much more interested in being a part of a post-revolutionary Cuba than the diasporic community, which will most likely follow historical pattern and be absorbed into the U.S. mainstream as another immigrant (no longer exile) community.” for more on Obejas and “Ruins”, click here.
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a bit about No Coast….(thanks, Time Out Chicago)
darkjive.com 
Book Review: More than just Race
(Norton Press, 2009)
According to William Julius Wilson, author of More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (in stores March 2009), “the disproportionate number of low-skilled black males in this country is one of the legacies of historical segregation and discrimination”. This statement cuts cleanly the notion that class-ism is the new racism. Racism’s shockwaves have not yet subsided. The book’s title alludes to the notion that race for race’s sake is not the virus plaguing America: it is “structural forces” (that is, individual decisions and “the machinery” (law, policy, and institutional practices).
In this book, Wilson essentially alludes that when the fight for integration took precedence over the fight to end impoverished conditions, neighborhoods (and people) suffered dramatically. They still do.
Class-ism is not the new Racism. It has lingered with us since Jim Crow and was, perhaps, the heavyiest load of old guard racism. In More than Just Race, Wilson quotes the late black economist Dr. Vivian Henderson as saying thirty years ago that “racism put blacks in their place, but changes in the modern economy make the place in which they find themselves more and more precarious”.
After the election of Obama, news sources nationwide asked, “It racism over? Is this the earmark we’ve all been looking for?” Wilson responds with this book. Race alone is no longer the issue that divides us. It is no longer nearly that simple.
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