Ernesto Mestre-Reed

Sacrificio

Eduardo Lago

Through an ingenious structure that jumps from narrator to narrator and spans decades, Call Me Brooklyn follows the life of Gal Ackerman, a Spanish orphan adopted during the Spanish Civil War and raised in Brooklyn, NY. A hymn to mystery and to the power of fiction, Call Me Brooklyn meanders through a series of settings: from Manhattan to haunts of writers and artists to the bar in Madrid where we learn the truth about Ackerman's past. Through an ingenious structure that jumps from narrator to narrator and spans decades, Call Me Brooklyn follows the life of Gal Ackerman, a Spanish orphan adopted during the Spanish Civil War and raised in Brooklyn, NY. Moving from the secret tunnels that shelter the forgotten residents of Manhattan to the studio where Mark Rothko put an end to his life, from the jazz clubs frequented by Thomas Pynchon to the bar in Madrid where we learn the truth about Ackerman’s past, Call Me Brooklyn draws upon a rich tradition that includes Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Bellow’s Humbolt’s Gift, and the novels of Felipe Alfau—a hymn to mystery and to the power of fiction.

Call Me Brooklyn

Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government. Cuba, 1998: Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit. When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones. A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.

Antonio Orlando Rodríguez

Journeying to Havana during the Roaring 1920s in the hopes of interviewing a legendary actress, two wealthy young men find themselves drawn into Cuba's exotic world of secret police, brothels, violent outbreaks, masquerades, and drum celebrations. By the author of Striptease.

Ernesto Mestre-Reed

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