Tentacle

Born and raised in the Dominican Republic and now living in Puerto Rico, Rita Indiana is a driving force in contemporary Caribbean literature and music. She is the author of three collections of stories and five novels. Three of her novels have been translated into English. Papi made World Literature Today’s 2016 list of 75 Notable Translations. Tentacle, published by And Other Stories, won the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers, the first book written in Spanish to do so. Achy Obejas is a writer, journalist and translator. She is the author of the novels Ruins and Days of Awe, as well as three other books of fiction. She edited and translated (into English) the anthology Havana Noir. She currently serves as the Director of the MFA in Translation program at Mills College in Oakland, California. She is from Cuba and lives in California.

'Tentacle is as strange and beautiful a sea-change as its epigraph from The Tempest suggests … Achy Obejas brings the volume to English language readers with a social burja-cyborg flare - at once witchy, almost shamanisitically intuitive about the nature of language, and yet precise.’ Alexandra Marraccini, Times Literary Supplement'Where to begin? Rita Indiana’s Tentacle has the settings, themes, and expansiveness of a much larger book, but it blends that ambition with a host of irreverence (along with some nods to the music of Giorgio Moroder, which is never a bad thing). It’s a time-travel story, a meditation on gender and sexuality, and an art-world satire—as well as, arguably, a satire of ‘chosen one’ narrative tropes. To say that this is unlike anything else you’ll read this year is probably stating the obvious.' Words Without Borders January Watchlist by Tobias Carroll‘Alcide is a queer world unto himself. He travels through the history of the Dominican Republic, revealing its queer foundations while challenging the notion that time and space are static, unchanging categories.’ Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins, Wasafiri 'From beginning to end, Tentacle is a strange, unnerving, and at times beautiful book that critiques global inequality and the politicization of climate change.' Amy Brady, Chicago Review of Books