ASMODEUS

Asmodeusa millennia-old demon whose powers are waningabandons the body of the forty-something rocker he has been inhabiting for decades to search for a younger vessel. With a unique style in which radical gestures exist alongside serene classicism, Asmodeus confirms Rita Indiana's status as a critical author in contemporary Latin American literature.

This leads him on a journey from one host to another, during which the reader is immersed in the motley emotional landscape of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1992: from the local heavy metal scene to the home of one of the Balaguer dictatorship's former torturers. In this stunning chronical drawn straight from a key period in Dominican history, the infernal lives of human characters get mixed up in the far-flung machinations of angels and demons. A comedy woven from a skein of tragedies and a metal opera in exquisite tenths, Asmodeus has echoes of Héctor Lavoe and Black Sabbath, but at its core, it is also a picaresque novel about how the Dominican folk figure of the Diablo Conjuelo set up residence in the Caribbean, written in the manner of Spanish Golden Age writers Francisco Quevedo and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Rita Indiana (Santo Domingo, 1977) is a key figure in current Caribbean literature. She is a writer, composer and Global Distinguished Professor in the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University, and has collaborated with El País, The Boston Globe, Granta and Vice, and her novels have been translated into ten languages. Versatile, cosmopolitan and transgressive, Rita Indiana is a rising star in the world of contemporary Caribbean music and in literature. She has published the novels La estrategia de Chochueca (Riann, 2000), Papi (Vértigo, 2005; Periférica, 2011), already a cult classic in the Caribbean, Nombres y animales (Periférica, 2013) and La mucama de Omicunlé (Periférica, 2015), finalist in the 2016 Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennial and winner of the Grand Prize of the Caribbean Writers' Association, the first novel in Spanish to win it. and Hecho en Saturno (Periférica, 2018). Her latest novel is Asmodeo (Periférica, 2024), highly awaited by readers and critics.