Brothers From Time to Time: a history of the Cuban Revolution with David Landau
Channel: Mechanics' Institute
Date: 2020-12-15

Join MI author David Landau as he presents his latest book Brothers From Time to Time, a history of the Cuban revolution, and a discussion of his 25 year writing and publication odyssey.

A word from the author:
As we were planning this event, I realized we’re not in San Francisco anymore. And what do we do with literature in a time of plague? In a word, we share it.



When we come together, we’ll have no authorial discourse; we can just talk about the book and its production. From start to finish, the process of publishing Brothers consumed three decades. Indeed, I might have slipped away and taken the story with me. But this story is not mine alone; It’s history, and of a highly perishable kind. It’s also a history that powerful people did not want published. What better reason to publish it?

Happily, this project had the connivance of new technology; and I don’t mean the Internet. I mean the extraordinary progress of print-on-demand. In my days as a publisher, print-on-demand was all but inadmissible. Today you can drop a file into a machine, throw in a few dollars, and out comes a volume almost gorgeous enough to be illegal.

Then there’s the story itself, which any fiction writer would have been thrilled to find. The first published review of Brothers, in The Washington Times, had this headline: “Cuba’s answer to ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’”  And, to turn the tables, one may only say the review successfully defended that outlandish claim.

An advance comment comes from one of my favorite writers in any language – and she writes in two – novelist Teresa Dovalpage. “With this book, I was able to find a piece of Cuban reality that I’d never known. Lots of Cubans like me, born in the sixties or later, have felt that we’ve been stiffed out of our country’s real history. In Brothers it’s all there – the hard stuff, gloves off.”

About the author: David Landau has been a recognized writer ever since he published a path-breaking book on Henry Kissinger in 1972, a few months after graduating from Harvard College. In the early 1990’s Landau wrote his first version of Brothers. It was done up in the best padded-leather style of the New York publishers; but somehow the publishers turned it away. A quarter-century later, Landau decided to try again with a much leaner, tougher version. He also decided to avoid mainstream publishing. A Spanish edition, Hermanos de vez en cuando, is nearly ready for the presses.