{"product_id":"9780140157659","title":"Before Night Falls","description":"\u003cb\u003e\"Any attempt to reckon with Cuba's torturous twentieth century will have to take into account Arenas's monumental work ... an essential human testimony, joyful and enraged, a triumph of conscience.\" — \u003cb\u003eGarth Greenwell\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe acclaimed memoir of queer Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas chronicling his tumultuous yet luminary life, from his impoverished upbringing in Cuba to his imprisonment at the hands of a Communist regime\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas \"is a book above all about being free,\" said \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e—sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what \u003ci\u003eThe Miami Herald\u003c\/i\u003e calls his \"deathbed ode to eroticism,\" Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels.","brand":"Penguin Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42542793097277,"sku":"9780140157659","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0603\/0838\/9949\/files\/9780140157659_p0.jpg?v=1771573572","url":"https:\/\/www.tatteredcover.mom\/products\/9780140157659","provider":"Tattered Cover","version":"1.0","type":"link"}