"Deeply moving, compulsively readable, Hotel Cuba chronicles the early twentieth century immigrant experience with a profound understanding and crackling urgency I've not previously encountered. I could not put it down and I could not stop thinking about it long after I'd reached its stunning conclusion. In short: You need to read this book. Right now."—Joanna Rakoff, bestselling author of My Salinger Year"Thick with the humid air of a Havana summer night, rich with mesmerizing detail, Hotel Cuba will grab you and not let you go."—Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, Balm and WenchFrom the award-winning author of The View from Stalin's Head, a stunning novel about two sheltered Russian Jewish sisters, desperate to get to America to make a new life, who find themselves trapped in the sultry, hedonistic world of 1920s Havana.Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet...

The ten stories in The View from Stalin's Head unfold in the post--Cold War Prague of the 1990s--a magnet not only for artists and writers but also for American tourists and college grad deadbeats, a city with a glorious yet sometimes shameful history, its citizens both resentful of and nostalgic for their Communist past. Against this backdrop, Aaron Hamburger conjures an arresting array of characters: a self-appointed rabbi who runs a synagogue for non-Jews; an artist, once branded as a criminal by the Communist regime, who hires a teenage boy to boss him around; a fiery would-be socialist trying to rouse the oppressed masses while feeling the tug of her comfortable Stateside upbringing. European and American, Jewish and gentile, straight and gay, the people in these stories are forced to confront themselves when the ethnic, religious, political, and sexual labels they used to rely on prove surprisingly less stable than they'd imagined.As Christopher Isherwood...