A Last Supper of Queer Apostles

Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice and Chilean Poet

The summary effect of reading Pedro Lemebel s shattering indictment of the American-backed Pinochet regime, of being faced with the caustic rage embedded in it, corresponds to standing transfixed in front of Picasso s Guernica, the lightbulb eyeball glaring down at the carnage below, the ocular shriek a fitting match for the illuminating text of A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, with its story of death and resurrection. James McCourt, author of Time Remaining and Queer Street

Lemebel said he writes from difference, and my god, what a difference. His writing is everything except boring courageous, beautiful, vile, glorious, provocative, comforting, angry, loving, exquisite, and full of delicious venom. Reading a great writer makes life better. Reading Lemebel makes me want to live better. Rabih Alamaddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman

Reading these powerfully intimate essays makes me feel like I know Pedro Lemebel. His friends are now my friends. The clothes they wore, the way the danced, the way they died all this will live on in my memory as if I d always had them in my life. Joe Westmoreland, author of Tramps Like Us

A remarkable and radically uncompromising chronicle of queer life in anti-queer times . . . Gwendolyn Harper s translation is astoundingly good. It allowed me to feel that I was being spoken to directly. And to know that Lemebel s personality, his poetry, his love, his grief, his anger, his generosity, his voice, are all still with us, and still true. Pedro Lemebel is alive! And I am in love. Keith Ridgway, author of Hawthorn and Child and A Shock
 
A truly astonishing body of work . . . Images so alarming and original leap from every page, you come to believe that if you were to tear a page it would bleed scarlet. . . . The writings of a curbside saint laboring serene under a weight of genius. Lauren John Joseph, author of At Certain Points We Touch

This book reminds me of Jean Genet, of the late great Juan Goytisolo of everything that I love about truly queer writing. It shares their rage, their laughter, their fierceness, and their courage. A truly sensational addition to our collective heritage. Neil Bartlett, author of Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

Extraordinary . . . A testament to the far more varied and beautiful truths about who lives and falls in love in Chile, be­yond the fathers that have dominated its literature . . . Prepare to be wrecked and resurrected, to be pulled into the world of char­acters who come immediately to life and who will not leave you. . . . Lemebel had a tremendous gift for unexpected metaphors, for how to conjure the singularity of a person through one strik­ing sensual detail. . . . Gwendolyn Harper s lively translations in this volume con­tain all sorts of inventive recreations of Lemebel s exacting slices into the intestines of Chilean speech. . . . I hope this volume will begin a long overdue international con­versation about, and celebration of, Lemebel s exhilarating work . . . a body of work that deserves a far more prominent place in the international canon of writing that has expanded humanity s understanding of itself. Idra Novey, from the Foreword

Lemebel s critique of the western colonisation of sexual identity was almost as vicious as it was of the Pinochet dictatorship. The Observer (London)