"A tour de force . built around the exciting and timely theme of revolutionary-turned-tyrant." -- The New York Times Book Review "Penguin Classics has recently published sensational new translations of two of Carpentier's novels, The Lost Steps (1953) and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962). What made them influential, and makes them so dazzlingly readable still, is their style. Needless to say, this marriage of style and subject would be illegible to English-language readers without a first-rate translator, and in Adrian Nathan West, Penguin Classics has found their man." -- The Wall Street Journal "The most remarkable translating feat I encountered in 2023 comes courtesy of Adrian Nathan West, who in The Lost Steps and Explosion in a Cathedral brings the almost orgiastically baroque prose of Alejo Carpentier into glorious English." -- Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal , via Twitter "In rich prose adorned with magical flourishes, Explosion in a Cathedral . touch[es] on still-reverberating themes of discrimination and racism, corruption and power, and the pursuit of self-determination versus the influence of former colonial powers.

" -- Americas Quarterly "The beauty of Carpentier's prose can never be emphasized enough, and here it rises to incredible levels. Explosion in a Cathedral is a novel that . has never finished saying what it has to say. Read today, some sixty years since its original publication, at the end of a pandemic, amid wars and totalitarian governments and a radical climate crisis . [it] continues to accompany us, to question us, to challenge and move us, and ultimately to help us in the arduous and terrible exercise of reading the world." Alejandro Zambra, from the Foreword.