Memorias Del Sanatorio (ePub)

Hector Valles, the author of Memoirs from the Sanatorium, lived for many years in Madrid and attended the graduate program on New York University in Spain. Later, he moved to New York where he graduated in 1983 from NYU, with a PhD in Spanish Literature. He then worked for several years as a teacher in schools in the inner city of New York as well as universities and a college preparatory school. His writings reflect his experience with the phenomenon of mental illness against the backdrop of the inner cities throughout the years.

After moving to Miami in 1989 with his wife,, he completed a Master’s in Psychology. He has worked in Miami for more than a decade, as a psychotherapist with the chronic mentally ill. Hector Valles continues to write about the mentally ill. His oeuvre includes another novel, La fuga, the product of his experiences in San Juan during the nineteen sixties and the war. Twenty years transpire, however, after that, before Memorias del Sanatori is written In the meantime Hector Valles has authored two collections of short stories, and a book of poems.

He has two works in progress at the moment: Hotel Continental, a novel, as well as Las aventuras de Pipe Valdivieso, a novelette. The author admits to a very slow creative process where a poem or story that was written several years ago might take a different twist and form itself with seventeen other poems into a book some twenty-seven years later. This type of creation lends itself to a brief oeuvre, however, perhaps of a high aesthetic caliber.

Dr. Valles has presented his work in the Miami Book Fair, as well as in libraries through out Miami. His stories are also sold in Puerto Rican book stores. He was a finalist at the Adonai Prize of poetry when living in Spain.