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Author's Books Please buy the novel and contribute to Edgar's Sushi Fund. Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak
What does it say about America when a middle-class young woman dissatisfied with her mixed ethnicity decides to convert to being Puerto Rican? That is exactly what red-headed Rebecca Lynn Horowitz does. A pregnancy prevention social worker to Latina teens, living a fairly sedate life in the middle class neighborhood of Brooklyn's Park Slope, our heroine undergoes a transformation such as you've never read. At a party in the summer of 2000 she meets Charlie Maisonet, a Puerto Rican dandy, and her biological clock starts ticking twice as fast. Through the twists and turns of her romance with Charlie, she moves to his pad in the East Village, becomes Zoraida Delgado, a Puerto Rican exotic dancer, and begins living la vida loca. Join the author as he once again explores the environs of this pseudo-bohemian Manhattan playground, bends the rules of novel writing and satirizes the memoir, sexual politics, gender roles, and the pretense of our society. He even throws in his own photos of some of the places in the East Village that the characters frequent, including Katz Delicatessen, The Sunshine Theater, Two Boots and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Are they really his photos or are they Zoraida's, a photography and film enthusiast? Oh, the novel also addresses the issue of the Iraq War in a most ingenuous way. From The Overlook Press in 2008. Read an excerpt below.  Naughtiness on the subway at 3 AM? Can you believe these people? Read on, blush or reach for your honey. From Chapter 1 of Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak Don’t worry about my holding back. I’m going to provide you with sufficient information as we go along. I will detail how I almost ruined my life thanks to living nearly four years of abandon and libertine-like behavior because of that son of a bitch, Charles Joseph Maisonet, the spic bastard, may he roast in hell because of what he did to me. Forgive me for not being politically correct but that’s how I feel. I even learned to speak Rican Spanish fluently and know how to say all sorts of juicy sexual things like: Quiero con ansias locas que me lambas la crica hasta que me venga como la perra que quiero ser para ti which loosely translated means: I want with insane desire for you to lick my cunt until I come like the bitch that I want to be for you. I know, totally unbecoming a sophisticated, modern career woman with supposed self-respect, but that’s what this man drove me to. You have no idea the degree of passion of these people. Shocked? I hope not because that’s at the mild, sedate end in the spectrum of my experiences courtesy of this maniac who whispered horribly sexual things to me even on public conveyances and sent me into paroxysms of desire and an urge to undress and be entered. Not surprisingly that is exactly what took place one night during the summer of 2002 on the subway on our way back from the Bronx. We had gone to a party at one of his cousins’ house where she lives with a Dominican and were alone on the last car of the D train at three in the morning. I’m resting my head against his shoulder when sweetly Charlie whispered one of his obscenities. I think it was: your cunt is smaller than a gerbil’s. And I go: Charlie, stop! but the words really turned me on and I’m suddenly nuts and grabbing at him. I have a thing about furry animals which I will go into later. I’m stoned and horny and there’s no one in the subway car so I hike up my dress and lay back on the long seat, place my Birkenstocked left foot on the subway car’s window sill and my right on the floor because we’re just leaving 125th Street and I know the train isn’t going to stop until it reaches 59th Street and Columbus Circle and I’m not wearing panties because, really, what was the use in the summertime with this Puerto Rican lunatic constantly after my bod which I'm obviously incapable of resisting. So now he’s going at me and it’s in the rhythm of the subway’s clackety-clack over the rails and I start having the mother of all orgasms and then I hear the conductor say: the next stop is 59th Street Columbus Circle. Change here for the A, C, and B trains and upstairs for the 1 and the 9 IRT trains. I’m oblivious and don’t give a damn and keep coming and screaming for Charlie to do it harder and suddenly the train stops and the doors open. I look up and this white lady gets on and says: Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude and she sits across the way and opens a Stephen King novel of all things. New Yorkers often ignore what’s none of their business. We’re excellent that way. Charlie finally goes off and we finish and discreetly, with my eyes, I make him aware of the lady across the way. He zips up and then shakes his head. The fucking nerve, Charlie says. What? I say and he gets very literary and says: The least she could do was read D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller or even Anais Nin in front of us. At which point we both burst out laughing and get up from where we’re sitting because there’s semen all over the seat where I’ve dripped and we go into the next car and sit down. To give the Devil his due I have to state that besides being well-hung, Charlie is also very well-read. At West 4th we change for the F and keep going until we get to Delancey Street and get off. Not get off like we have another orgasm, but alight from the train. Right! Whether in Brooklyn or Manhattan, the F is still my favorite train and you know what F stands for. Don’t go there! It stands for FREAK.  From Booklist Vega Yunqué's ribald and rambling style reverberates throughout his third novel, the saga of a "gringo whiteboy" trying to make it big in New York City. Along the way, Vega Yunqué deftly skewers the politics of academia, the "tyranny of mediocrity" in contemporary American literature, and America's ongoing prejudice against Puerto Ricans. A raunchy, in-your-face vehicle for Vega Yunque's many causes, and he, unlike the formulaic novels he disparages, definitely has a lot to say. Deborah Donovan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow... is an inventive, high spirited novel...And, of course, I like his politics.” --Alasdair Gray, author of Lanark and The Book of Prefaces “Vega Yunqué has written a remarkable novel tracing the life of a young bruja (witch), Maruquita Salsipuedes, and her love relationship with a white punk rocker, Omaha Bigelow. Part Piri Thomas, part Gabriel García Márquez, and part J.D. Salinger, this picaresque tale forces us to think about, and laugh at, the absurdity of our various cultural stereotypes.” --New York Post “Vega Yunqué ... has a keen intelligence, an ear for dialogue and a flair for zany passages of magic realism.” --Publishers Weekly Published October 2004, The Overlook Press. Please buy this book and contribute to Edgar's Sushi Fund. Join the author as he once again explores the environs of this pseudo-bohemian Manhattan playground, bends the rules of novel writing and satirizes the memoir, sexual politics, gender roles, and the pretense of our society. He even throws in his own photos of some of the places in the East Village that the characters frequent, including Katz Delicatessen, The Sunshine Theater, Two Boots and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Are they really his photos or are they Zoraida's, a photography and film enthusiast? Oh, the novel also addresses the issue of the Iraq War in a most ingenuous way. From The Overlook Press in 2008. The text you type here will appear directly below the image Join the author as he once again explores the environs of this pseudo-bohemian Manhattan playground, bends the rules of novel writing and satirizes the memoir, sexual politics, gender roles, and the pretense of our society. He even throws in his own photos of some of the places in the East Village that the characters frequent, including Katz Delicatessen, The Sunshine Theater, Two Boots and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Are they really his photos or are they Zoraida's, a photography and film enthusiast? Oh, the novel also addresses the issue of the Iraq War in a most ingenuous way. From The Overlook Press in 2008. The text you type here will appear directly below the image  Winner of the 2004 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. “This sprawling, iconoclastic, ambitious, stunningly written novel that is part picaresque, part Bildungsroman and part recapitulation of America’s last half-century...belongs on the shelf with its epic siblings: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” --Washington Post Book World (cover review) “An exceptional epic shaped by the jagged rhythms of jazz...you’ll be humming Bill Bailey long after the music stops.” --People Magazine (critic’s choice) Hardcover: Published October 2003, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Paperback: Published October 2004, Picador.  Zinsbegoochelende literaire roman die staat als een huis.   --Voice Literary Supplement Published Spring 1991, Arte Público Press, U. of Houston.  "Mendoza's Dreams...shows us, in 12 funny and personality-laden tales, that there is indeed much more to life in Spanish Harlem than gang warfare; set to the strains of Bernstein and Sondheim." --San Francisco Chronicle Published Spring 1987 by Arte Público Press, U. of Houston.  In his novel The Comeback (1985), [Vega Yunqué's] satirical idea, that Puerto Ricans can be anywhere and anybody, which may, after all, not be so far from the truth, is pushed to the extreme. --Professor Wolfgang Binder, U. of Erlangen, Germany, "Hispanic Voice of Satire: Ed Vega's Portrait of the Puerto Rican Community," published in Voix et Langages aux Etats-Unis, Actes du Colloque des 20, 21 et 22 Mars 1992, Publications de L'Université de Provence. Published Spring 1985, Arte Público Press, U. of Houston.  |
Some other books and anthologies in which Vega Yunqué's work appears.  A Whistler in the Night World, Colchie, Thomas, ed. “Eight Morenos,” a short story, Penguin Plume, 2002.  Criss-Cross Tales: Short Stories from English Speaking Cultures, “The Kite,” a short story, Studentlitteratur, Lund, Sweden, 2002.  Growing up Puerto Rican, ed. Joy de Jesus, Foreword by Ed Vega, a short story, "Spanish Roulette," William Morrow, New York, 1997.  Under the Pomegranate Tree, ed. Ray Gonzalez, "Home Movies," a chapter from Dhread, a novel, Washington Square Press, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Shuster Inc., New York, 1996.  Spanish Harlem: Photographs by Joseph Rodriguez with an essay by Edgardo Vega Yunqué. Smithsonian Institution, 1994.  Currents from the Dancing River, ed. Ray Gonzalez, "The Last Dream," a short story, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994.  Iguana Dreams, eds. Delia Poey & Virgil Suarez, "The Clocks, Ribbons, Mountain Lakes and Clouds of Jennifer Marginat Feliciano," a novella, Harper-Collins, New York, 1992.  Reading Literature and Writing Argument, Prentice Hall, 2002  The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature, Prentice Hall, 2001.  Growing up Latino, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.  Hispanic Writers of the United States, Arte Público Press, 1984 |
