Sideways Glance
https://www.amaurea.co.uk/amaureapress/p/sideways-glance
Objects exist to serve us, to make our lives more comfortable, warmer. Objects accompany us from birth to our final breath. They surround us, we choose them and they choose us. We look after them, and they look after us. Objects have their own stories, and they tell ours. Every object that we own (or that owns us), however insignificant, bears our mark, and a deep, invisible connection joins us. It is out of this that Sideways Glance comes.
This is a book about the most everyday of objects. Anna Lidia Vega Serova brings together the fragments of a life, outlines that become confessions or discoveries. Here she presents a vision of the surrounding world through the briefest of glances - playing, always playing.
Sideways Glance is a collection of vignettes (illustrated by the author herself), which - like a mosaic, like a musical fusion, like the life of a person or a nation - have been broken and pieced back together over and over again.
Originally published in Spanish as Mirada de reojo (Ediciones Unión 2010), the stories have been translated into English by Annery Rivera Velasco and Jonathan Curry-Machado.
"The evocative power of objects arouses in this book.... the autobiographical associations of a writer who explodes the conventions of the short story." (Marilyn Bobes)
"This is not a traditional book of stories... but a collection of literary prints, in which the author assembles and disassembles much that happens in everyday life, while touching the deepest of emotions." (Marta Rojas)
"Anna Lidia Vega Serova is one of the most provocative voices of the current Cuban literary scene." (Paloma Jiménez del Campo)