SOPHIE WENBAN recommends a remarkable Italian quartet who revive Bluegrass on period instruments to give a taste of the communal spirit that first made it popular
Letters from Latin America with Leo Boix: February 2025
An outstanding novel by Chilean writer and activist Pedro Lemebel, a poetry pamphlet by Venezuelan Natasha Tiniacos, and a children’s book of haikus singing the beauty of Cuba
Family issues and dragon-fuelled history amount to a vacuous spectacle that ill-fits the theatre, muses SIMON PARSONS
Monster profits on the Tube, paternal dilemmas for time travellers, and an alien abduction buddy saga
New releases from The Jayhawks, Primal Scream, and Max Subar
MIGUEL YOSHIDA explains the evolution and influence of the Cuban Casa De Las Americas in joining culture to the revolutionary struggle
Flitting between myth and the modern world, Medusa is determined to steer clear of human affairs. When her resolve crumbles, the result is petrifying in every sense
MY TENDER MATADOR (Pushkin Press, £10.99), by Chilean writer, activist, and performance artist Pedro Lemebel, begins in Santiago, Chile, in the spring of 1986. The narrative, skilfully translated by Katherine Silver, unfolds days before the 13th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, which commenced following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government by a coup d’etat supported by the US on September 11 1973.
At the heart of the novel is the Queen of the Corner, an endearing queer man who lives in a scrawny house in a lower-class Santiago neighbourhood and who embroiders tablecloths and napkins to subsist.
He falls in love with a revolutionary hero called Carlos, a university student who mysteriously appears in his life by hiding some boxes in the Queen’s room on the house’s rooftop.
Similar stories
JOHN CALLOW introduces the work of Geoffrey Trease, who placed ordinary people at the centre of his historical fiction for children, creating adventurous stories to inspire the possibilities of social change
LEO BOIX reviews two powerful Latin American novels in which myth and crime fiction expose the deadly consequences of patriarchy, clandestine abortion and state violence
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin