Books
The Brooklyn Rail recommends…
Daniel Chavarría, Adios Muchachos (Akashic Books, 2001), $13.95 paperback.
A salacious, gender-bending story about a Havana “bicycle hooker” named Alicia, who’s got more curves than J-Lo and an even savvier business sense. The prolific and perverse Uruguayan writer Chavarría, here translated into English for the first time, delivers a brilliantly comic, never sentimental parable about the real meaning of free trade.
Una historia lujuriosa y sexualmente torcida acerca de una “prostituta bicicletera” llamada Alicia, más curvilinea que Jennifer López y con un astuto sentido para los negocios. El perverso y prolífico escritor uruguayo Chavarría, traducido al ingles por vez primera con esta obra, nos entrega una brillante y nada sentimental parabola cómica acerca del verdadero sentido del libre comercio.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
25. 20th Century; Havana, Cuba
By Raphael RubinsteinOCT 2022 | The Miraculous
She is the toast of Havana, a wealthy courtesan who consorts with presidents and generals, who owns numerous houses and nine splendid automobiles, which she drives herself (she is said to be first woman in Cuba to possess a driver’s license).
A Roundtable Conversation: Alicia Ramírez talks to Dr. Alisa Hurwitz and Jesús Dávila as Empty Theaters Breed Mental Health Concerns
By Alicia RamírezJUL-AUG 2021 | Theater
Writer Alicia Ramírez digs deep into the complexity of the absence of in-person theater and its effects on mental health with avid theater goer and arts educator, Jesús Dávila, and Dr. Alisa Hurwitz, a psychologist knowledgeable in theater and the arts, in a roundtable discussion.
Missing in Havana
By Rubén GalloJUNE 2022 | Critics Page
Havana’s Cabaret Las Vegas is one of the most eccentric nightclubs in the world: a dingy, state-owned bar that, about a decade ago, was officially designated Cuba’s first gay nightclub (to my knowledge, it is the only gay bar in the world that was opened by military decree). Inside, government employees donning socialist uniforms tend, apathetically, to an audience that includes: done-up drag-queens in gold lamé dresses, chubby Miami Cubans wearing heavy gold chains, male hustlers just arrived from the countryside, middle-class queens roughing it for the night, aging Italians in search of a Latin Tadzio, and even the odd American tourist who appears to have walked into the wrong cabaret.
Dog Story
By Chris ArpJUNE 2021 | Fiction
Our original fiction this month comes from Brooklyn writer Chris Arp. In “Dog Story,” a cantankerous father adopts a dog for his daughter. Crisp observation and introspective flashes reveal a chewed up character who wants a better world, but finds dark humor in the world he has.
