René’s Flesh

A cult classic from pre-embargo Cuba, this dark coming-of-age tale details a young man’s unwitting initiation into a cult of flesh, or carne. This is the first unexpurgated English language edition of a novel that combines elements of horror, the picaresque, and philosophy reminscent of Kierkegaard and de Sade. A wild, bloody ride unlike anything you’ve read before.

“Piñera makes Stephen King look like Dr. Seuss.” —Alan Ryan

The celebrated Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera’s greatest novel, René’s Flesh, first published in 1956, opens in an unnamed city in an unspecified time with René, a young man about to turn twenty, standing in line outside a butcher shop where he has been sent by his father to buy some meat. Faced with a hanging side of beef, René recoils. In Spanish, carne can mean both meat and flesh, and throughout Piñera’s pathbreaking novel of initiation, René is in a desperate flight from his carnal existence, as he moves through a world full of people who either want to mortify his flesh or use it for their pleasure. Will René succeed in outrunning the destiny his father has bequeathed to him? Only the man weighing the meat knows for sure.

Out of print for over two decades, Mark Schafer’s masterful English translation has been carefully revised for this reissue.