Wild Desire (Paperback)

Searingly political, extravagantly stylish non-fiction from a queer Latin American literary icon, in English for the first time Pedro Lemebel made a life of political resistance. Through Chile's brutal military dictatorship to its uneven transition to democracy, he wrote of marginal lives and inconvenient truths that disturbed official narratives: the last days of trans sex workers dying of AIDS, the glitzy literary salon held above a torture chamber, the routine violence suffered by sexual and political dissidents. In a freewheeling style of baroque imagery, high camp and scabrous critique, Lemebel brought visibility and dignity to the lives of sexual minorities, the poor and the powerless. Wild Desire marks the first English translation of the major work by an iconic figure in Latin American literature. Drawing on memoir, reportage and fiction, Lemebel forged an innovative literary language to re-write his country's history from the margins. Dazzling, furious and endlessly subversive, his acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde today reverberate around the world.