Tentacle: Winner of the 2017 Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers - Softcover

Indiana, Rita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911508342 ISBN 13: 9781911508342

Publisher: And Other Stories, 2018

Synopsis

Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean - and humanity - from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was - with the help of a sacred anemone.Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it's a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.

About this title

About the Author

Rita Indiana is a Dominican music composer, producer and key figure in contemporary Caribbean literature; Tentacle won the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers in 2017, the first Spanish-language book to do so. She is the author of three collections of stories and four novels, and is a driving force in experimental Dominican popular music along with her band, Rita Indiana y los Misterios.Achy Obejas is a writer, journalist and translator. She is the author of five books of fiction and has translated Junot Diaz and Wendy Guerra, among many others. She is from Cuba and lives in California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Before she worked at Esther’s house, Acilde sucked dicks at El Mirador, without ever taking off her clothes, under which, her body – with its small breasts and narrow hips – passed for that of a fifteen year-old boy. She had a regular clientele, mostly married men, sixty-ish, whose dicks only perked up in a pretty boy’s mouth. She’d usually wear a Polo shirt a size too big so she’d look even younger and, rather than assiduously pacing the block like her colleagues, she’d sit on a bench under an orange lamp light pretending to read a comic. The more disinterested she made her boyish self seem, the more clients she had. Sometimes she took such great pains to come off like a schoolboy out for fresh air, just leaning back on the bench, her legs crossed with a foot on her knee, that she’d forget what she was there for until a booming car horn brought her back to El Mirador and the desperate men checking her out from behind the windows of a BMW.This was how she’d met Eric, Esther’s right hand man, and shook him up. A Cuban doctor with movie star looks, Eric didn’t need to pay for sex but he was crazy for those middle-class white boys who sold themselves so they could buy the pills they were addicted to. That night in the presidential suite – what they called the patch between the bushes where the grass was softest – Acilde sucked him and let him grab her head. Eric touched her hairless cheeks and pumped them with cum, recovering his erection almost immediately. “Get naked cuz I’m gonna stick it in you,” he ordered, while Acilde spit to the side, brushed off the knees of her jeans with both hands and asked for the five thousand pesos that had been named as the price for the blowjob. “I wanna screw you,” Eric said, jerking off as car lights raced over his chest and belly. Acilde hadn’t quite finished saying, “Gimme my coin, faggot,” when Eric launched himself on top of her, immobilizing her, face down, stifling her screams of “I’m a girl” with the gravel now stuffed in her mouth. At this point, Eric didn’t care what she was and just shoved his dry dick up her ass. When he finished and Acilde stood to pull up her pants, he flicked a lighter and approached her to confirm the truth, which is that she was a woman. “I’m gonna pay you more for the special effects,” he said. And when she saw how much more, she accepted his invitation to breakfast.

Edition details

• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1911508342
• ISBN 13: 9781911508342
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160