num_pages: 317
description: "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." --  Garth GreenwellThe 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 regimeThe astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas "is a book above all about being free," said  The New York Review of Books --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  The Miami Herald  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.
language: English
title: Before Night Falls
titlecomplete: Before Night Falls
genres: Biography, Gay, History, Autobiography, Spanish Literature, Queer, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir, LGBT
ratings_count: 6214
places: New York City, New York, New York (State), Cuba
awards: awardedAt: 725875200000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Gay Biography/Autobiography
publisher: Penguin Books