A special evening with acclaimed Dominican writer, musician, and artist Rita Indiana in celebration of her new novel, Admodeus, a hallucinatory thriller about a failing demon’s search for a new host in post-dictatorship Santo Domingo.
On this evening, Rita joins us for her first literary event in the neighborhood she calls home. She will be in conversation with Alex V. Cruz to discuss her return to fiction, and the intersections of literature, music, memory, Santo Domingo, identity, and place that have shaped her singular body of work.
The evening will include an intimate conversation, reading, audience Q&A, and book signing, bringing our community together to celebrate one of the Dominican Republic’s most distinctive contemporary literary voices.
Copies of Asmodeus will be available for purchase through Word Up Community Bookshop, including English and Spanish editions.
A maximum of 80 attendees. Please register in advance. The event space is located on the second floor, which is accessible by elevator from the first floor elevators.
Asmodeus, a millennia-old demon, has inhabited Rudy, a once-legendary Dominican rock star, for decades. But in 1992, the demon’s powers begin to fade. What follows is a desperate weeklong odyssey as Asmodeus ricochets through the bodies of the inhabitants of Santo Domingo’s underworld: from Guinea, a young metalhead plotting a warehouse heist, to Mireya, the daughter of a former torturer, to other souls caught in his chaotic orbit. Each possession reveals another layer of a city still reeling from the Balaguer dictatorship. And each new host engenders a surprising tenderness in the demon.
From acclaimed musical artist and author Rita Indiana, Asmodeus is written in urgent prose punctuated by original décimas, ten-line rhyming poems drawing from Latin American musical and oral tradition. Indiana weaves together Dominican heavy metal, black magic, and political trauma. Asmodeus is a supernatural noir, riotous thriller, and searing portrait of a nation grappling with its complicated past.
Rita Indiana is a writer, composer, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She has written six novels including Tentacle, winner of the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers. She lives in New York City.
