José Lezama Lima

About the author

José Lezama Lima was a Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist whose elaborate, image-rich writing grew alongside the literary journal Orígenes, which he helped shape. Paradiso draws on family memory, education, and cultural history in a dense coming-of-age novel whose queer dimensions are inseparable from its broader imaginative architecture. His poetry and essays offer other entrances into the symbolic world that the novel builds.