A Last Supper of Queer Apostles

Selected Essays

By: Pedro Lemebel, Gwendolyn Harper - editor translator introduction, Idra Novey - foreword

Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Vico Ortiz, Idra Novey, Gwendolyn Harper

Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

“Intoxicating . . . Sexy, political and deeply humane . . . We all owe Penguin Classics a round of shots for A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.”—The Washington Post

A galvanizing look at life on the margins of society by a crowning figure of Latin America's queer counterculture who celebrated “melodrama, kitsch, extravagance, and vulgarity of all kinds” (Garth Greenwell) in playful, performative, linguistically inventive essays, now available in English for the first time

A Penguin Classic

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas—that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. Touching on everything from Che Guevara to Elizabeth Taylor, from the aftermath of authoritarian rule to the daily lives of Chile’s locas—a slur for trans women and effeminate gay men that he boldly reclaims—his writing infuses political urgency with playfulness, realism with absurdism, and resistance with camp, and his AIDS crónicas immortalize a generation of Chileans doubly “disappeared” by casting each loca, as she falls sick, in the starring role of her own private tragedy. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing listeners of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. People trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

©2023 Pedro Lemebel (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“This intoxicating and profane selection has been rendered into English with eye-bulging frankness by Gwendolyn Harper. Each brief ‘crónica’ . . . is a mini-revelation. Sexy, political and deeply humane, these coiled essays demonstrate clearly the perennial importance of radical speech acts. . . . Harper excels at capturing the spirit of source material often considered untranslatable. Significant lexical inspiration is required to express Lemebel’s arch, rat-a-tat punning, while ninja syntax skills are needed to re-create the fragments and convolutions of his sentences. What she makes of his crónicas retains the eccentricities of the original while being quite exquisite in English. . . . We all owe Penguin Classics a round of shots for A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.”—The Washington Post

“An extraordinary—a necessary—voice in world literature . . . Lemebel’s essays . . . are incantatory and mutant . . . mordant and at times feverish . . . florid to the point of camp . . . [a] mix of tenderness and subversion. . . . Part memoir, part reportage, part fantasia, they narrate history as it was experienced underground. . . . Lemebel wages a guerilla reckoning . . . in radically queer prose.”—4Columns

“What a joy for English readers to at last meet this humanist provocateur who celebrates and memorializes queer lives in a fascist state with fire, love, and a tireless spirit of play.”—Publishers Weekly