I just received Cezanne Cardona’s latest novel, Esto también es una casa [This, Too, is a House] published by Seix Barral in 2025. It was launched on October 2, 2025, at the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities [Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades] in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Description: Javi lives in a wooden house above the hardware store that his mother runs. But depending on the weather, his grandfather, the shootings, or his father’s rage, Javi’s house can be upstairs or downstairs.
Upstairs, his mother’s name is Pilar; downstairs, she’s a bombshell [una Chica Bombón]; upstairs, his father is a welding mask; downstairs, a ghost; upstairs, Javi changes his grandfather’s diapers; downstairs, he scares off his mother’s suitors; upstairs, he creates snow by rubbing foam blocks together; downstairs, he builds a beach with the sand that is sold in sacks; upstairs, Javi is a cruel child; downstairs, he’s a tender teenager; upstairs, he’s from the United States; downstairs, he’s Puerto Rican.
Esto también es una casa is a tour de force between a son and a mother, between a house and a hardware store, between what can be fixed and what never will be, between pain and tenderness, and between the beauty and violence inherent in living in the Caribbean.
With clean, precise, profound, and subtle prose, this novel puts into practice Nabokov’s commandment: “cherish the details, the divine details.”
Cezanne Cardona (Dorado, Puerto Rico, 1982): Writer, columnist, and professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. In 2009, he won one of Puerto Rico’s most prestigious literary awards, the El Nuevo Día Short Story Prize. In 2018, he was awarded the Nuevas Voces Prize and the National Prize from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature for his short story collection Levittown mon amour.
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I just received Cezanne Cardona’s latest novel, Esto también es una casa [This, Too, is a House] published by Seix Barral in 2025. It was launched on October 2, 2025, at the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities [Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades] in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Description: Javi lives in a wooden house
