My Tender Matador

‘One of the great novels of the past half century’ GARTH GREENWELL

A rediscovered queer classic: the subversive, blazingly beautiful oddball romance between an ageing trans woman and a young revolutionary by a Latin American icon

It is spring 1986 and Santiago's streets are aflame with protests against the dictator Augusto Pinochet. From her lavishly decorated hovel, the Queen of the Corner embroiders linen for the wealthy, dreams of romance, and listens to boleros to drown out the rioting and gunshots. When handsome young macho Carlos waltzes into her life, the ageing queer swiftly agrees to help with his clandestine activities. As a strange connection blooms, their fates careen towards that of the dictator himself.

Written in lushly imaginative prose that blends the sordid and the profound, the romantic and the militant, My Tender Matador is a transgressive queer classic of desire and revolution.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Katherine Silver.

Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) is considered one of the most important queer writers of twentieth-century Latin America and was also an activist and a performance artist. Born in Santiago, Chile, he became a renowned voice of Latin American counterculture during the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath. He received Chile's José Donoso Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is best known for his crónicas, a selection of which was published by Pushkin as A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, and one novel, My Tender Matador, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was adapted in 2020 into a critically acclaimed film by Chilean director Rodrigo Sepúlveda.

Katherine Silver's most recent translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, César Aira, Verónica Zondek, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. She is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), and the author of Echo Under Story.