Cut Guavas: or Postscript to the Civilization of the Simians - Tapa blanda

Evading the wrath of company lawyers zealously protecting their franchise, Robert Antonis novel, written partially in film-script form, pays fan-fiction homage to that famous simian brand, whilst at the same time deconstructing the saga for what it has to say about race in the film and in American society. Austin Stoker a character based on a real-life Trinidadian actor in Hollywood is shooting the sequel to Assault of the Civilization of the Simians in his old age, the Hollywood film that launched his moderately successful acting career. But Stoker, drinking back-home Trinidadian remedies but not taking his prescribed dementia medicine, finds separating reality from fiction to be an increasingly difficult task. Intercut with this film script and the often funny backstory of the ageing actors lives is a moving novella about Austins mother, Madeleine, a servant in a rich French Creole house in Trinidad in the 1940s, and her affair with Austins white father, Barto, a colonial narrative that is in its own way as much about a vanishing fantasy life as the world of Hollywood. Theres still another layer, which readers of Antonis Bocas prize-winning As Flies to Whatless Boys will anticipate with pleasure: the presence of wickedly comic metatextual authorial notes and commentary. Cut Guavas is written in a spirit of fun that nevertheless makes serious points about race in the New World imagination. A master storyteller, Antoni combines its multiple strands in a way that feels both effortless and seamless.

Robert Antoni is equal parts Trinidadian, Bahamian and US citizen. His first novel, Divina Trace (Quartet, 1991), received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an NEA, and is recognized as a landmark in Caribbean writing. His other books are Blessed is the Fruit (Faber), My Grandmothers Erotic Folktales (Faber), Carnival (Faber), which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2006, and As Flies to Whatless Boys in 2015 (Peepal Tree Press). Antoni is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the NALIS Lifetime Achievement Award from the Trinidad and Tobago National Library. He draws upon his two hundred years of family history in Trinidad and Tobago and his upbringing in the Bahamas. Antonis short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and other periodicals, including as the Editor's Choice for The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (1985). He holds an MA from Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA and a PhD from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is a former Associate Professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at the University of Miami, where he taught for nine years and acted as Associate Director of the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute. He lives in Manhattan and teaches in the graduate writing program at The New School University.