Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Sovereign

The Sovereign

Colarusso, Andrew Elias

Paperback

Series: Puerto Rican Literature

Literary Fiction

Publisher Price: $17.00

ISBN10: 1943150109
ISBN13: 9781943150106
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: May 26 2017
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.05
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.40
Language: English

13 October --01 and inching toward midnight, Lieutenant Frances Villegas sits at a Steinway trying desperately to play Stravinsky's Petrushka while the Colonel watches, wheezing from a wing chair. They are waiting on the enigmatic voice of the people, Adjutant General Arjún J. Joglar, due to arrive at any minute from Lares. Downstairs, Baldomero Richter, presiding over a captive body stripped bare of clothes, hair, genitals, and one ear, awaits an order to terminate. It is the eve of the Evangelist Insurrection and in a few hours the great city of XXX XXXX will go up in smoke, swallowed by the warm waters of the Caribbean. All of this to declare, finally, independence.

2 March 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act determined that Puerto Ricans would forever thereafter be mainland American citizens. One hundred years later, The Sovereign marks the centennial anniversary of the Jones Act as both paean and polemic for the history of the island nation. A hybrid chronicle stretching itself in every temporal direction, the charming magical realism of the Latin Boom (that forgot about Puerto Rico) is here warped by the uncanny spectacle of an emancipated colonial imaginary. The Sovereign is an extended meditation on what it means to be ecstatically free--and the blood price a people must pay for that freedom.

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