Oscar Hijuelos's first novel, Our House in the Last World (1982), concerns a New Yorker who is haunted by the stories his parents tell of Oriente province in Cuba, where they emigrated from before his birth. A reissue of this novel with a new afterward by Hijuelos was published in 2002 by Persea Press.

In Hijuelos's novel A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good (2002), Cuban music and nostalgia again are major themes: a Cuban composer, travelling in Europe in the 1940s, ends up mistakenly interred in the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Jamaica-born poet Claude McKay, who was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, captured the spirit of exile that is felt in this book in his poem "The Tropics in New York." That poem is now available in Claude McKay: Selected Poems (1999).

In...