RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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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
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IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
New releases from The Tenementals, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin, and Kuunatic
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
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.
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