Latest Review: "Mundo Cruel" by Luis Negrón

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Camila Santos on Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón, from Seven Stories Press.

Camila is a Brazilian translator, and has written for Three Percent before—way back in 2010. Here’s a bit of her review:

Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award.

Negrón lives in Puerto Rico and works as a bookseller, and is also coeditor of an anthology of queer writing from Puerto Rico. Other than the recently translated Mundo Cruel, his only other work in English is the essay “The Pain of Reading,” which appeared in the Sunday Review of the New York Times, and was also translated by Levine.

The characters in Mundo Cruel constantly face prejudice, heartbreak, poverty, gossip, and death. Is the fictional world in Luis Negrón’s stories cruel? Most certainly. But Mundo Cruel is peopled by resilient, funny, and surprisingly optimistic characters. The book consists of nine tightly constructed stories mostly set in Santurce, a neighborhood in the outskirts of San Juan. What’s truly surprising in Mundo Cruel isn’t the queer themes it explores, but the degree of narrative control and skill present in Negrón’s work.

For the complete review, go here.