Publisher Profile / Restless Books

Restless Books

Facts

Mission: “Restless Books is an independent publisher for readers and writers in search of new destinations, experiences, and perspectives. From Asia to the Americas, from Tehran to Tel Aviv, we deliver stories of discovery, adventure, dislocation, and transformation.

Our readers are passionate about other cultures and other languages. Restless is committed to bringing out the best of international literature—fiction, journalism, memoirs, travel writing, illustrated books, and more—that reflects the restlessness of our multiform lives.“

Publisher: Ilan Stavans

An Interview with the Publisher

Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books, was curious, and what he found was a wonderfully pleasant surprise: Cuban science fiction. Stavans tells FTW about some of the far-out authors and books he found in Cuba and is bringing to the English-speaking world.

Ilan Stavans
Cuba has been described as a place frozen in time. What is different about the science fiction produced by a people who are, in many ways, sudden time travelers to the twenty-first century? Cuba is a utopia gone sour. (Don’t all of us live in something like that?) Science fiction there is more than a hundred years old, meaning it starts before Fidel Castro dreamed up a dystopian future in the Sierra Maestra in 1958. But the crop of SF writers active under Communism is particularly intriguing; they write about alternatives realities with the full knowledge that they live in one of them. Of course, the argument should be made that SF, no matter where it comes from, isn’t about the future; instead, it is a veiled depiction of the present. In the case of Cuban SF, this argument is decisive; metaphor is king where metaphor prevails.