About this Event
The Banned Book Club is led by Bryn, dedicated to reading and protecting the most important and threatened books for our generation.
This month, we’re reading Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García — a lyrical, multigenerational novel about exile, memory, and the ways history fractures a family across borders. Moving between Cuba and the United States, García traces three generations of women whose loyalties, longings, and identities are shaped by revolution and distance.
The novel has been challenged and removed from curricula for its depictions of sexuality, political critique, and its frank portrayal of Cuban identity outside U.S.-approved narratives of patriotism and exile. Like many works by Latin American and diaspora authors, it has been targeted precisely because it complicates a single “acceptable” story.
Intimate, poetic, and powerfully layered, Dreaming in Cuban reminds us how personal history is inseparable from national history — and how literature preserves the truths that politics tries to erase.
We will meet in person in the loft at our store at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $18, which includes a copy of Dreaming in Cuban to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
CRISTINA GARCÍA is the author of eight novels, including Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, and Here in Berlin. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fifteen languages. She’s taught at universities nationwide and was a resident playwright at Central Works Theater in Berkeley.
ABOUT BOOK BANS:
Books are under profound attack in the United States. PEN America's latest report, Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning, found that 6,870 books bans were enacted during the 2024-25 school year, across 23 states and 87 public school districts. And everywhere, it is the books that have long fought for a place on the shelf that are being targeted. Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history. PEN America pushes back against censorship and the intolerance and exclusion that undergird it.
Check out some frequently asked questions about book banning: https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questions/
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
USD 19.26
