Proceeds from sale of this book have been donated to 826NYC who offer highly individualized creative writing instruction for over 4,000 young New Yorkers every year. Free programs throughout NYC empower young authors and develop crucial skills they need to thrive in the classroom and beyond.

“(D)on’t think for one minute that Black Imagination is easy. As you will read here, it is hard-earned and sometimes dangerous, but it’s necessary, and radical, to claim and work towards. Listening to my people in this book gave me so much life, and I’m pretty sure, dear reader, you’re in for the same.” —from the Foreword by Steven Dunn

  What is your origin story? 
How do you heal yourself?
 Imagine a world where you are loved, safe, and valued.

  “Witnessing is sacred work too. Seeing ourselves as whole and healthy is an act of pure rebellion in a world so titillated by our constant subjugation,” reflects viral curator Natasha Marin, on Black Imagination. This dynamic collection of Black voices works like an incantation of origin, healing, and imagination. Born from a series of conceptual art exhibitions, the perspectives gathered here are no where near monochromatic. “Craving nuance over stereotype, we sought out black children, black youth, LGBTQ+ black folks, unsheltered black folks, incarcerated black folks, neurodivergent black folks, as well as differently-abled black folks.” Each insists on their own variance and challenges every reader to witness for themselves that Black Lives (and Imaginations) Matter.  

  “Black Imagination reads like a survival guide with a sense of humor as deep as its sense of history, a literary oasis for black people fed up with the white gaze.” 
—The Stranger

  “Our bodies and actions are under external control, but the well-spring of rebellion is our own imagination. In Black Imagination, Natasha Marin shows us how to free our imagining — as a first step toward freeing ourselves.” 
—Gloria Steinem  

“Black Imagination is somehow as innovatively utopic as it is sincerely soulful. I’ve never felt the physical feeling of pages melting in my hands or chapters folding themselves into squadrons of black airplanes flying to freedom because I’ve never experienced an art object like Black Imagination. It is exquisite art in action.”
 —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy  

  “Black Imagination required Natasha Marin to curate as a curate in the medieval sense—a spiritual guide that cares for souls. This assemblage—at once a book, an installation, a secret meeting and a waiting room—dares to sing an aria in white and violet with Brooks. We are challenged to move beyond the abject, beyond pure pessimism, on the wings of a different criticality—to walk with Hayden, with Douglass ‘visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.’” 

—Christian Campbell, author of Running the Dusk

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My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Hardcover

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My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a novel told in fifteen stories, linked by the same protagonist, our narrator, who—in her own voice and channeling the voices of others—creates an unsparing, multigenerational portrait of her native Cuba. Though she feels suffocated by the island and decides to leave, hers is not just a political novel—nor just a queer novel, an immigrant novel, a feminist novel—but a deeply existential one, in which mortality, corporeality, bureaucracy, emotional and physical violence, and the American Dream define the long journey of our narrator and her beloved pet dog, who gives the book both its title and its unforgettable ending. In its daring style and structure—both playful and profound, youthful and mature—and its frank discussion of political and sexual identity, My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog marks the emergence of an original and essential new voice.

Praise for My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog

Listed as a featured top book by Publishers Weekly, Chicago Review of Books, and Ms Magazine.

One of Lithub’s ”5 Books You May Have Missed in July.”

“(A) boundary-breaking work… at once wild, compassionate, and challenging… precise and correct.”
—ZYZZYVA

“This profound and delightful novel-in-stories… is a breathtaking exploration of identity, country, art, and family.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is a power and rawness to these stories that is deeply affecting....clever and intriguing.”
—Booklist

“Unique, raw, funny, ruthless prose.”
—Cristóbal Pera, Editor, Vintage Español

“There is only one way to know that you are alone, believing you are not,” said a voice in My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog. Thought-capsules such as this pop open when least expected in this intriguing collection of vignettes in which bodies and beings are bound to a collective claustrophobia that stretches from the small towns in Cuba to the big city of Miami. There is something rotting away here. It is pervasive, and it reeked. It reeks of the decay of humanity. And yet, as much as there is sullenness of expression throughout, so too are there flashes of tender joy and humorous affection, like the tossing of a flip flop into the air or the wagging of a dog’s tail. The book ends wagging its tail, and it made me wag mine.”
—Giannina Braschi author of Yo-Yo Boing!

“Legna Rodríguez Iglesias is the most enchanting Cuban writer alive today and My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog is a wry, brilliant and delightful ride.”
—Achy Obejas author of The Tower of Antilles

“There is a winning self-awareness to these stories that charms as much as it disorients. Funny, surprising, and disturbing—not so much by turns as in layers, all at once—the fifteen sections of Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s strange and wonderful My Favorite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog stand alone and also build on one another. I both admired and enjoyed this book, happy to get a little lost along its deceptively meandering paths, and happy to have this author snap me back to attention, over and over, and then startle and satisfy me with the ending. Even as she yanks you around, Rodríguez Iglesias knows precisely what she’s doing: she’ll rip your heart out—with a wink.”
—Hadley Moore author of Not Dead Yet and Other Stories

“In My Favorite Girlfriend Was a Bulldog, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias reminds the reader that revolution lives in the world and in the self. Dog is a droll god in Cuba, one that takes the protagonist on wild adventures in these interconnected stories that slay me with their wry humor and potent storytelling.”
—Carmen Gimenez Smith author of Milk and Filth

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