The Sovereign (Puerto Rican Literature)

Colarusso, Andrew Elias

ISBN 10: 1943150109 / ISBN 13: 9781943150106

Published by Dalkey Archive Press, 2017

About this Item

Open Books is a nonprofit social venture that provides literacy experiences for thousands of readers each year through inspiring programs and creative capitalization of books.

Seller Inventory # mon0000833891

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Sovereign (Puerto Rican Literature)
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1943150109
• ISBN 13: 9781943150106
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

13 October ―01 and inching toward midnight, Lieutenant Frances Villegas sits at a Steinway trying desperately to play Stravinsky’s Petrushka while the Colonel watches, wheezing from a wing chair. They are waiting on the enigmatic voice of the people, Adjutant General Arjún J. Joglar, due to arrive at any minute from Lares. Downstairs, Baldomero Richter, presiding over a captive body stripped bare of clothes, hair, genitals, and one ear, awaits an order to terminate. It is the eve of the Evangelist Insurrection and in a few hours the great city of XXX XXXX will go up in smoke, swallowed by the warm waters of the Caribbean. All of this to declare, finally, independence.

2 March 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act determined that Puerto Ricans would forever thereafter be mainland American citizens. One hundred years later, The Sovereign marks the centennial anniversary of the Jones Act as both paean and polemic for the history of the island nation. A hybrid chronicle stretching itself in every temporal direction, the charming magical realism of the Latin Boom (that forgot about Puerto Rico) is here warped by the uncanny spectacle of an emancipated colonial imaginary. The Sovereign is an extended meditation on what it means to be ecstatically free―and the blood price a people must pay for that freedom.

About the Author

Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature from New York University and received an MFA from Brown University. He is founder and editor-in-chief of The Broome Street Review.