Act 1, Preface
For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 wit...
Chapter 1
There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his f***ing own, and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he wou...
Chapter 2
But that's not what I wanted to tell you. It's about that crazy feeling that started this whole mess, the bruja [witch] feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blo...
Chapter 3
Considered our national "genius," Joaquín Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death...
Chapter 4
For f***'s sake, we were at Rutgers—Rutgers was just girls everywhere, and there was Oscar, keeping me up at night talking about the Green Lantern. Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we,...
Act 2, Preface
It was only when I got on the plane that I started crying. [...]. I felt sorriest for the viejo [old man] next to us. You could tell he'd been visiting his family. He had on a little fedora and his...
Chapter 5
The reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas, not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate, to be hosting tertulias [chats], to be doing anything out of the ordinary. (2....
Chapter 6
Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carousels groan unde...
Chapter 7
Twenty-seven days. Wrote on each and every one of them, wrote almost three hundred pages if his letters are to be believed. Almost had it too, he said to me one night on the phone, one of the few c...
Chapter 8
These days I live in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, teach composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College, and even own a house at the top of Elm Street, not far from the steel mill. […...