René's Flesh

A cult classic from pre-embargo Cuba, this dark coming-of-age tale details a young man's unwitting initiation into a cult of flesh, or carne. This is the first unexpurgated English language edition of a novel that combines elements of horror, the picaresque, and philosophy reminscent of Kierkegaard and de Sade. A wild, bloody ride unlike anything you've read before.

“Piñera makes Stephen King look like Dr. Seuss.”  —Alan Ryan

The celebrated Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera’s greatest novel, René’s Flesh, first published in 1956, opens in an unnamed city in an unspecified time with René, a gay man just turned twenty, standing in line outside a butcher shop where he has been sent by his father to buy some meat. A hanging side of beef confronts him, and faced with it, Rene recoils. In Spanish, carne can mean both meat and flesh, and throughout Piñero's pathbreaking novel of initiation René is in desperate and unavailing flight from his fleshly existence as he moves thorugh a world full of people who want him and people who want to do him harm. And who, finally, can tell the difference? Certainly not René.

Out of print in for over 25 years, Mark Schafer's masterly English translation has been carefully revised for this reissue.