Imagining Tanya

These early stories by the award-winning novelist, David Allan Cates, take place in Mexico and Central America during the war years of the 1980s. The protagonists are exiled lovers—broken for the most part and trying to make sense of their new world of grief. Far from home and working in a boatyard, on a movie set, a banana freighter, as a veal salesman, medical interpreter, writer, and Sandinista volunteer, they’re forced to re-imagine not only love, peace, suffering, and beauty but the meaning of their very own lives. “The stories in David Allan Cates’s Imagining Tanya, sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, are always moving. Like his novels, they’re the perfect mixture of tough and tender, full of heart, mystery, and wisdom. But the compressed form allows him to focus on the strange, subtle moments that turn a life upside down or right it again, even if his characters don’t always recognize the change when it comes. In these rich pages, a host of American ex-pats wandering in Central America—some innocent, some jaded—all carry with them the potential for an earthly, messy sort of grace, gifted to them by a masterful storyteller.” – Scott Nadelson, author of One of Us and The Next Scott Nadelson “David Allan Cates creates a vivid, unforgettable world of souls lost in Central America in the 1980s. The characters’ heartbreak and displacement are mirrored by the larger conflicts of war all around them, and they seek redemption in the bravery of loving through pain. Imagining Tanya is a bold, gripping, and seductive collection, full of moments of grace.” – Maxim Loskutoff, author of Ruthie Fear and Come West and See