July 2023. A short story collection about gay men in a community in Puerto Rico.

Darkly comedic and full of surprises, I enjoyed this quite a bit. Variety in the format of the stories kept it interesting from start to finish, as well as the mix of absurd and grounded moments.
For example: one story is one side of a phone call between a man and his friend, another is a series of letters and notes on doors from a very annoying acquaintance, while other stories are a more standard format from start to finish.
Deals with some dark subject matter with absurdist and knowing humor and black comedy, from individual and societal bigotry to the AIDS crisis, from hook up culture to overly defining oneself by an identity as an outsider or for suffering, from religious trauma to misogyny within gay culture.
But with some laugh out loud moments.

This was one I grabbed from the library after doing a search for short story collections that were available at my nearest library branch, and finding the title and cover fascinating. Glad I picked it up!

I added some of the books from the pull quotes for it, curious to read some other unique queer stories by those authors.

“Mundo Cruel: Stories” by Luis Negrón.

Beautifully weird short story collection centred around queer life in Puerto Rico.

Fascinating, at times sexy, full of humour and melancholy in equal measure.

Sarcastic, vulgar, titillating, real.

Negron's Mundo Cruel is a beautiful, if short, read. Each story feels like a complete whole, which can be hard to achieve with collections like this one.

The tone and voice are very unique. Although the descriptions are minimal, I really felt as though I were in Puerto Rico with the characters, living their lives with them.

"The Garden" is my favorite within the collection, despite being one of the sadder tales Negron is telling, and invokes so much in so few pages. Hopefully, Mr. Negron will have a few other translations available in the future.

These stories may reflect the writers musings on his real every day life. There are details and background color that interests me because i now reside in Puerto Rico most of the year. It is well written and an easy read.

Going into this book, i was aware that accepting homosexuality is part of the books theme. As a heterosexual, I was still surprised and amused by how many males in the stories had hidden 'down low' behaviors. Then I remembered those were the characters he noted, to progress the stories, even if their presence seemed more common than I expected.
I may have had some sort of minor realization about humanity: having been frequently molested by older males during my first 12 years (after 12 i cant say most of them were older), maybe i made a mistake and assumed that meant their sexuality was mostly heterosexual. Maybe those who would molest children only pose as heterosexuals.

3.5 ⭐️ Funny, sarcastic and insightful. Very interesting stories with new takes on queerness and homophobia, I personally haven’t read anything like this before.