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Soto, Francisco. Reinaldo Arenas. New York: Twayne, 1998. 185 pp. ISBN 0-8057-4554-8
Reinaldo Arenas (1943-90) is today among the best known of the writers exiled from Cuba. His literary production, especially his novels, has appeared published in English, a posthumous tribute to an indefatigable writer who at the time of his suicide was living in abject poverty in New York City's Hell's Kitchen. A rather dramatic figure, Arenas painfully depicted his flamboyant and tragic life in his posthumously published autobiography Antes que anocheza (1992; Before Night Falls, 1993). In it, unlike any other Latin American writer, Arenas dwells on issues of gay behavior in a harsh depiction of himself as a sexual outlaw. This straightforward, out-of-the-closet activism brought the autobiography into the center of heated controversies among Latin American/Latino and gay communities, as the subject of the interaction between sexuality and socio-political activism. The highly acclaimed film version "Before Night Falls" (2000), by American artist Julian Schnable, has continued political discussion of the homophobia systematized under the Cuban Revolution, and it has projected Arenas's figure into the international level.
Francisco Soto's book takes a look at Arenas's literary collection: the short stories published in the collections Con...