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>> Distant Journeys

ISBN: 0-927534-15-0
112 pp. | paper only | $10.00 

Rafael Castillo

In Castillo's Distant Journeys, nothing is sacred. On Guadalupe Street, Sister Fortuna will tell you whether you're dead or alive - it's worth a few bucks. A few miles down the line, the Virgin of Guadalupe is causing an earthly mess and unbelievable bottlenecks with her apparitions on front porches and babies' buttocks. On New York's Lower East Side, a Chicano dwarf composes his diary under the encouraging eye of blowup posters of Zapata and Kierkegaard. Elsewhere, the Goy from Aztlán battles with issues of cultural dualism, while in Latin America the corrupt colonels are plunged into abysmal despair. In these rich and invigorating contemporary fables and complex allegories, irony reigns supreme. Castillo, in his own inimitable style, depicts existential angst, crises in identity, cultural anomie, literary parody, and sojourns into the consciousness of characters trapped in the nightmare of the American dream.