FACE, 175 pages.

Available from Wings Press, San Antonio. ISBN 0-930324-90-0

FACE, Viking, New York, 1984, 194 pages, (out of print).
Contemporary American Fiction series, Penguin, New York, 1985
(out of print).

"When I read Face in 1985, it struck me as an extraordinary achievement, all the more extraordinary for being a first novel. Rereading it has not changed my estimate....Face continues to haunt me."

-- From the foreword by J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize, 2003.


"The author reveals the immense power of human will and obsession; an original, complex portrait of survival."
Cathy Colman, New York Times, April 28, 1985

From Face:

HE IS wandering the street outside. It is dark, no moon, only the kerosene lights glow red in the doorways. The windows are shut tight against the night air. Something is different, uncanny. No trace now of cobblestones, only the lightness of this feeling, his feet barely touching, effortless, like riding a bus, or flying, skimming over the surface quickly, like a dragonfly over water, yes, and feeling what? Some kind of freedom. And then panic. Touching. Touching to make sure. Why isn't the handkerchief there? Why is his face exposed? Someone has died. And sharp, with that knowing, row upon row of dimly powered lamps swing naked from wires overhead, bright streets (dark only a moment ago) fill with walkers, all solemn, hatted, in a ceremony closed to him, all with handkerchiefs over their faces. And the signs painted red over the doorways: "Moved," Closed," "For Sale," "Deceased."

He was about to enter the picture show, a room plush, velvety; wine-dark like the soul, and there to take his seat. He was supposed to be there. He had been called. Something there, a welling cloud, a balloon of blue air, now bulging, now concave: eyes, brows, cheekbones, a vast blue Madonna with sad eyes, pulsating, breathing mercy at him, her sad smile, blue lips, skin now pulsing, throbbing with light, each cell opening like a pore, and in each pore, each cell, a face, hundreds of faces, each throbbing, pulsing with its own light."

FRIEZE, 175 pages.

Available from Wings Press, San Antonio. ISBN 0-930324-91-9

FRIEZE, Viking, New York, 1985, 224 pages (out of print)
Contemporary American Fiction series, Penguin, New York, 1986
(out of print)

"As delicately phrased as a prose poem. A parable that opposes the pride and power of the state to the slow resistances of human life."
Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Nov. 16, 1988

"Elegant form and vigorous detail give Frieze its mesmerizing power. The pure distance of it is mouth-watering, like a sweepstakes vacation."
Josephine Humphreys, The Nation, November 15, 1986

From Frieze:

"Perhaps it began there, this journey into night, perhaps it was then: the point where return was no longer possible, return, if return could be, to something remembered or something perhaps that never really was.
Looking back, it seems to me that everything had color at the beginning: the sweetness of the days following one another, the sandstone, the stoneyard, the candy vendor beating his water harp--bright color, as if childhood ran way past its time, playing tag with rainbow powder, every day a feast.

Yet when I think, before the darkness--my own--long before. . . Some gray dawn--not just the stone--overtook me in mist, exiled me to a world of black or gray, condemned me to pry apart the porousness of a stone gone dark, forgetful of the fire that gave it life, that spilled it from the stony womb of earth and sent it coiling down dark hillsides, trailing sparks in the night with each sweep of its serpent robes, stone tongues licking, devouring the rice, setting fire to whole villages, entombing the living with the dead, feeding, ravening, till sated, it curled up at last and went to sleep.

Even now, touching it, prodding it with my chisel, even disguised in the commonplace of these ornaments for hire, does the stone remember? Does the chisel remind it of the fire?"

LOVE QUEEN OF THE AMAZON, 283 pages.

Available from Wings Press, San Antonio. ISBN 0-930324-69-2.

Paperback, 254 pages. $17.95

THE LOVE QUEEN OF THE AMAZON, Little Brown & Co., Boston, 1992-1993
255 pages, (out of print)
London, Hamish Hamilton, 1992
Munich, Bertelsmann, 1993-1994
Amsterdam, Uitgeverij-Arena, 1994
Penguin, UK, 1992

"Ana Magdalena Figueroa is one of the few great Latin heroines not created by the male imagination. Cecile Pineda has enhanced the roster of modern literature's most remarkable female characters with her brilliantly drawn portrait."
Richard Martins, The Chicago Tribune, March 8, 1992


From The Love Queen of the Amazon:

"Many years later Ana Magdalena could remember only the hold of that ship where destiny had led her. She could still picture the hull made of carefully fitted, tarred planks of wood. But there her memory stopped altogether, because all she could imagine was that the floor of the hold had been covered with flowers, a solid bed of them, and that she must have rolled on petals fragile as the wings of night moths, and that their bodies, hers and Sergio's, had been coated with the powdery, moon-colored dust of the wings of cecropias, and that the linens were of the massed and funereal petals of faded chrysanthemums; and that when he pressed his mouth to hers, she felt the ephemeral beating of a humming bird's wings, and that when he entered her at last, her body raised its bone spoon to another of his lips and that she became the exquisite tube of the moist, night-blooming cereus, and that she held him in the sticky sap of her embrace like the wriggling and pathetic tarantula that squirms helplessly before dawn when the enzymes began their slow process of liquefaction and returned their bodies to their ancient roots at the fountains of the oceans, in the blankets of the fog. All this she imagined in the twinkling of an eye, or perhaps an eon. And of the myriad moments of her life that she reviewed throughout her time thereafter, and even at the moment of her death, it was always this one that stood out from all the others as the most satisfying.

But for Sergio Ballado, satisfaction was quite another matter. He had plans. He was going to be rich. "Listen, woman," he said to her, "there's no room for us in this pissant town. Why don't we both get married. . . ? Tomorrow I'm leaving for Bélem. I'm going to work the excursion boats for the rich yanquis who go upriver to shoot game. And when I get back, I want you to be waiting because I'm going to come back rich!"

FISHLIGHT: A DREAM OF CHILDHOOD , 103 pages

Available from Wings Press, San Antonio.

ISBN 0-930324-67-6 paper $16.00

ISBN 0-930324-73-0 hardback $22.95

"Fishlight is a gentle, beautiful book, a rare and poetic song from an exquisitely melancholy childhood, written with heartbreaking innocence and a great love of life. It is original, poignant, profoundly simple and unforgettable." John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

From Fishlight:

There was a little house, just an ordinary house. It had everything inside: it had a bed, and a table, and a dryer to hang the wash out over the stove, and every time the water boiled, the shirts would wave their crazy arms, my father's long johns shook and shimmied, and my mother's white opera gloves played the piano till the fingers glowed red over the gas jets.

Inside his room you could see my father reading his book till he nodded in his chair and when he fell asleep the pages would flutter and turn over on his lap. In the kitchen you could see my mother shelling peas and getting dinner ready.

When my mother called him to supper, my father woke up with a snort. His head would snap back on his neck the way it was supposed to, and the pages of his book would stop turning over and smooth themselves flat. He would close the book with a bang and slip it in the dark place where he hid things under his easy chair, and when he stood up the world didn't go backwards anymore. But when he went in the kitchen, his chair sucked in all the lamp light till it swelled up like my mother's bread dough, only in the kitchen, my father got so little, my mother had to tie his napkin under his chin so he could eat. He kept banging on the table with his spoon till my mother brought him his Portuguese sardines. She had to open all the tins for him, but she cut herself every time because the tins never had any keys. She was always licking the blood off her thumb.

I was small enough to get inside the house, but they didn't know which house I was inside of, the big house, or the little house.

BARDO99, 80 pages

Available from Wings Press, San Antonio. ISBN 0-930324-83-8, paper $ 14.00

From Bardo99::

The tenth floor corridor gives on the isolation ward. There must be some 20 or so bunks in rows to either side. Patients perch, some of them, on the edge of their beds. Some sit quietly at the far end of the room where they have grouped their bedside chairs. There is no talking. One man vomits quietly into a kidney basin.

Outside the weather is rainy, overcast. One of the buildings is partially collapsed. On the roof a crew in lead contamination aprons shovels the debris into wheelbarrows, civilian workers probably, or scheduled populations. In the far distance, he can see robots lumbering back and forth, pushing debris off a ledge. Most of it rains down onto a dump truck parked below. Behind it, rows of empty trucks await their turn, engines idling, spewing exhaust in the wintery air.

--You have instruments here I can use, no doubt?

--Instruments? Lipsey and Chernoff look at him blankly.

--I was told not to bring my own.

Chernoff seems troubled.

--I see.

Lipsey clears his throat.

--What we have here is a ward where we assign only people who were either present at the time of the explosion, or exposed immediately afterwards. (He drops his voice.) All of them have received ...

--doses beyond acceptable limits, he offers, nodding emphatically to show he understands.

--Exactly, Chernoff picks up. Unfortunately, their prognosis is not at all encouraging. Foreign experts--Dr. Fault among them--are of the same opinion...

--Yes, I'm aware of Dr. Fault's assessment...

They have come to a stop beside an empty bed.

--You're probably wondering why they have assigned you here...

--The CRO unit wants me to further my training the better to respond in such emergencies

--Yes, of course. That would normally be the case...

--Unfortunately, Lipsey clears his throat, unfortunately here, no one is--shall we say--immune. We (he indicates his colleague) have been assigned because until now we have received no exposure whatsoever as far as anyone can tell. We will be here for 24 hours to minimize our own risk. We will be evacuated when another fresh CRO team takes over. This evening, to be exact.

--And I'm prepared to assist in whatever way I can...

Chernoff clears his throat.

--I'm afraid you don't quite understand...

--Understand...? He stares at Chernoff in silence.

--Well, says Lipsey, don't you want to know why they assigned you here?

--My orders...

--No. Your orders are unsigned.

REDOUBT, 70 pages

Available from Wings Press, San Antonio.

"If you're a writer or a serious reader, looking for prose that takes you to the type of places where few have successfully kept your attention before, pick this one up. Redoubt is told through the mind of one unfathomable woman permanently relegated to warn of imminent invasion by the Enemy. Redoubt will carry you into an emotional maelstrom where Apocalypse would seem like liberation, in contrast to the heroine's timeless solitude. Enmeshed in an existence more Huit Clos than Sisyphus's most dreaded nightmare, it will carry your unwilling Self into niches of life never described in any dictionary. Redoubt is as close as I've ever come to "being one" with a woman, through the pages of a book."

Rudy Garcia http://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/06/bloodsuckers-quinones-like-son-redoubt.html

From Redoubt:

Hear that struggle in the corridor? Press your eye to the keyhole. See her in there? Like a egg, she is. All sugar ruffles, pink pastel, fresh from the pastry tube. Smart, ahn't she? Give herself airs, a duchess at the very least, long fingernails lacquered vermilion, pressing the mouthpiece to her gums, pouting-like, pulling on her hookah, sucking on the tube, drawing the air in, making bubbles in the bowl. See her in there? Like a clown she is, legs spread, peaked cap, hectic spots of rouge, the fluted ruff, the garish wig, tight henna'ed curls. Watch now. See if you can stand on tiptoe. See? It's them! The hockey team! thundering down the chute! millions of them, piling up in their sweaty best. Throwing their weight against the gate. Bending it, bulging it, bowing it, BANG! splinters flying! The big one there, the fatty, see him streaking through the clutter of shin guards, sticks and pricks, ahead of all the others now, charging for the puck, huff and puff, a hero at the very least! Hurling himself on the shining, shimmering splendor. CRACK! The yolky lake spreading its golden puddle on the floor. What a mess! See him now? on all fours? lapping it up, licking, licking in there, head first, swallowed up. Ah, yes, ah, yes: the spider bleeds the soft stuff white, while in the corridor the also-rans lie dying. Can you hear it? out there? It's them. See them clowns, all cyclops eyes, squinting through the keyhole? Peering at you? Grinning? Trying to make you out in the obscurity? They're pulling on the guy ropes, hauling you in. They're sure it's you. You can hear everything they say. See them straining for a look? Row on row of them: painted faces, scruffy ruffs, the smudgy white, red noses pressed to the pane, smeary red lips, scarlet-stained teeth. Grinning, waving, clamoring, pushing. Can you see them now? red pompons bobbing, hurling confetti? shouting SURPRISE!!!"