Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You

Name: Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
Author: Julián Delgado Lopera
ISBN: 9781324097211

Julián Delgado Lopera

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Julián Delgado Lopera

awards won

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Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses. Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio's light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma's death. Lonely and love-starved, Valentina aches to discover the details of her mother's drowning, and for her father to snap out of his depression. But Ignacio can't. He spends listless afternoons smoking cigarettes in long blonde wigs, telenovelas humming in the background, haunted not only by matrimonial guilt, but by memories of a young man he once loved and betrayed. From Ignacio's tragic past emerges the luminous queen of Bogotá's queer underground, Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who he first met under the silvery lights of Club Aquario when he was just a shy country boy. With Alma gone, Mamadora steps in as a mother figure to Valentina the way she once did for the girl's father. But as an expert in Travesti Lore, she fears the worst: that Ignacio's self-destruction may have unleashed a curse on them all.

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