Juan Pablo Rivera’s Futuro país imaginario: Violencia y esperanza en la narrativa puertorriqueña del siglo XXI [Imaginary Future Country: Violence and Hope in 21st-Century Puerto Rican Narrative] (2025) was recently published in the series entitled “Nexos y Diferencias: Estudios de la Cultura de América Latina” by Iberoamericana Vervuert. In this book, Rivera examines the literary production of five contemporary Puerto Rican authors: Mayra Santos Febres, Carlos Vázquez Cruz, Eïrïc Durändal Stormcrow, Ana María Fuster Lavín, and Janette Becerra. Here is an excellent description by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (Michigan University).
Description: “Armed with queer, formalist, and postcolonial literary theory, Juan Pablo Rivera scrutinizes the narrative work of five contemporary Puerto Rican authors. His careful analysis of a short novel, a chronicle, and various stories by Mayra Santos Febres, Carlos Vázquez Cruz, Eïrïc Durändal Stormcrow, Ana María Fuster Lavín, and Janette Becerra reveals the complex realities of a precarious colonized country that negotiates enormously difficult social contexts and seeks to approach something different: that ‘imaginary future country’ that oscillates between prophetic and catastrophic. Spanning realist texts, science fiction, and horror stories, which often touch on feminist and LGBTQIA+ themes, Rivera explores the ways in which contemporary Puerto Rican narrative challenges traditional conceptions and inserts itself into global and cosmopolitan trends while maintaining its Caribbean specificity, sometimes rural, sometimes tragic or hilarious, and sometimes gothic and extrasensory. This book is a very valuable contribution to Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American literary studies.”
–Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Michigan University
Juan Pablo Rivera holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. He is the author of two poetry collections— La fuga de cerebros (2015) and En invierno la batalla (2021)—and has published numerous articles on Latin American literature and the study of gender and sexuality. He is the author of La hermosa carne. El cuerpo en la poesía puertorriqueña actual (2021; Honorable Mention from the Puerto Rico International PEN 2021). He co-edited the book Lección errante: Mayra Santos Febres y el Caribe contemporánea. A finalist for multiple awards in teaching excellence at Harvard and at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he presently teaches, his courses center on Latin American literature, language, and culture from Modernism until today.
Excerpts translated by Ivette Romero. For more information, in Spanish, see https://www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es/FichaLibro.aspx?P1=252313
Also see https://www.clarku.edu/faculty/profiles/juan-pablo-rivera/