A satisfying take-down of a very Latin American breed of politician if ever there was one.įrom this politically satirical opener, Alemán weaves in threads of supernatural intrigue, detective noir, and feminist concerns, creating a deeply Latin American, metatextual novel that is, as Samanta Schweblin rightly writes, “unclassifiable”. His death? Electrocution by way of a puddle of his own piss.

Published by City Lights in 2018 and translated by the exquisitely named Dick Cluster, Poso Wells is a genre-blurring novel, with a boldly blue cover spliced with holographic lightning bolts, one which explicitly evokes Latin American indifference to the disappearance of women (“the story was not missing women, but the country’s future”), police corruption and eco-colonialism.Īfter a noir-esque prologue, imbued with sticky discomfort by way of a bag of mangoes, we witness the utterly absurd demise of a shiny-faced, cocaine-snorting politician who’s campaigning for votes in the (invented) South American slum town of Poso Wells. His many published translations include fiction and poetry from the Caribbean, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain.This post contains affiliate links to independent bookstores. He is editor/translator of the recently released Kill the Ampaya!: Best Latin American Baseball Fiction, and co-author with Rafael Hernandez of History of Havana. This is her first full-length work to appear in English.ĭick Cluster is a writer and translator living in Oakland, California. Her stories have appeared in anthologies in French, English, Chinese, Hebrew, and Serbo-Croatian. Her other books include the short story collections, Maldito corazon, Zoom, Fuga permanente, and Album de familia her novels in Spanish include Body Time, Poso Wells, and Humo. Her literary honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 member of Bogota 39, a 2007 selection of the most important up-and-coming writers in Latin America in the post-Boom generation one of five finalists for the 2015 Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia) for her story collection La muerte silba un blues and winner of several prizes for critical essays on literature and film. She received a PhD at Tulane University and holds a Master's degree in Latin American Literature from Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar. Gabriela Aleman, based in Quito, Ecuador, has played professional basketball in Switzerland and Paraguay and has worked as a waitress, administrator, translator, radio scriptwriter, and film studies professor.

Álbum de familia by Gabriela Alemán