José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana in 1962. After graduating with an engineering degree from a university in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, he lived in Russia for twelve more years. He has translated works by Joseph Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova into Spanish, and taught Russian history in Mexico City. He lives in New York.

Esther Allen was born in Auburn, California, in 1962. She is the author of an International PEN report on Translation and Globalization. Allen is the co-director of PEN World Voices and is an assistant professor at Seton Hall University.

Now in paperback, José Manuel Prieto's Rex is a sexy, zany, and sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos who have settled in western Europe.
J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As J. attempts to give the boy a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, he also becomes the personal secretary of the boy's father, Vasily, an ex-scientist that J. suspects is on the run from gangsters. Vasily's wife, Nelly, a seductive woman always draped in mind-boggling quantities of precious stones, believes the only way to evade the gangsters is an extravagant plan linking Vasily to the throne of the czars.
Rex is an unforgettable achievement: an illusory, allusive gem of a novel that confirms José Manuel Prieto as one of the most talented writers of his generation.