Poso Wells

A noir, feminist eco-thriller, in which venally corrupt politicians and greedy land speculators finally get their just comeuppance!

In the squalid settlement of Poso Wells, women have been regularly disappearing but the authorities have shown little interest. When the leading presidential candidate comes to town, he and his entourage are electrocuted in a macabre, darkly hilarious accident witnessed by a throng of astonished spectators. The sole survivor—next in line for the presidency—inexplicably disappears from sight.

Gustavo Varas, a principled journalist, picks up the trail, which leads him into a violent, lawless underworld, and ultimately to a strange group of almost supernatural blind men. Bella Altamirano, a fearless local woman, is on her own crusade to pierce the settlement's code of silence, ignoring the death threats that result from her efforts. It turns out that the disappearance of the candidate and those of the women are intimately connected, and not just to a local crime wave, but to a multinational magnate's plan to plunder the country's ecologically sensitive cloud forest.

A political satire and noir thriller, laced with humor and a sci-fi twist, Poso Wells plunges its readers into dark passages where things are as uncontrolled and overheated as the lava from a smoking volcano, which is where the story ends.

Praise for Poso Wells:

“By expertly weaving multiple narratives around the figure of Vinueza, the hapless (but wealthy!) presidential candidate who resembles so many corrupt (but wealthy!) presidential candidates in the modern history of Ecuador, Gabriela Alemán depicts with verve and humor the horrors and absurdities of a society intent on perpetuating itself.”—Mauro Javier Cardenas, author of The Revolutionaries Try Again

"Gabriela Alemán has a rhythm worth watching … she does something unexpected, things fly apart, she leaps into the void, and you think, 'there's no way she can pull this off&rsquo—but no, everything fits together, falls into place, flows, and the story goes on."—Pedro Mairal, author of The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra

"Poso Wells is ironic, audacious, and fierce. But what is it, exactly? A satire? A scifi novel? A political detective yarn? Or the purest reality of contemporary Latin America. It's unclassifiable––as all great books are."—Samanta Shweblin, author of Fever Dream

"Through scalding wit and straight-faced parody this no-holds-barred absurdist adventure that seems more a movie than a book will have you laughing till you cry as the cruelty of its South American reality sinks in. Imagine a mix of Hunter S. Thompson and Gabriel García Márquez. A small masterpiece."—Michael Taussig, author of Beauty and the Beast

Gabriela Aleman is an Ecuadoran novelist and short-story writer, born in 1969. She studied translation at Cambridge University in the UK, Latin American literature at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Ecuador (master's) and Latin American cinema at Tulane University in the U.S. (doctorate). She has also played professional basketball in Switzerland and Paraguay and worked as a waitress, administrator, translator, radio scriptwriter, and professor. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Film, Video and Radio Studies.
 
Her literary honors include: member of Bogota 39, a 2007 selection of the most important up-and-coming writers in Latin America in the post-Boom generation; one of five finalists for the 2015 Premio Hispanoamericano de Cuento Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia) for her story collection La muere silba un blues; and winner of several prizes for critical essays on literature and film.

Her stories have been translated into French, English, Chinese, Hebrew, and Serbo-Croation. Among other anthologies, she appears in Les bonnes nouvelles de l'Amerique latine. Anthologie de la nouvelle latino-americaine contemporaine (Gallimard, 2010).

Poso Wells was published by Editorial Esketra, Quito, 2007 and then in three subsequent Ecuadoran re-editions; by Editorial Aristas Martinez, in Badajoz, Spain 2013; and by Editorial Oriente in Santiago de Cuba, 2013. It will be the first of her novels to appear in translation.

Dick Cluster is a writer and translator living in Oakland, California. He is editor/translator of the recently released Kill the Ampaya!: Best Latin American Baseball Fiction, and co-author with Rafael Hernandez of History of Havana. His many published translations include fiction and poetry from the Caribbean, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain.