Bad Seed: Stories

by Gabriel Carle
translated by Heather Houd

A vibrant debut short story collection depicting the disillusionment that comes with being young and queer in Puerto Rico.

The visceral, wildly imaginative stories in Bad Seed flick through working-class scenes of contemporary Puerto Rico, where friends and lovers melt into and defy their surroundings—night clubs, ruined streets, cramped rooms with cockroaches moving in the walls. A horny high schooler spends his summer break in front of the TV; a queer love triangle unravels on the emblematic theater steps of the University of Puerto Rico; a group of friends get high and watch San Juan burn from atop a clocktower; an HIV positive college student works the night shift at a local bathhouse. At turns playful and heartbreaking, Bad Seed is the long overdue English-language debut of one of Puerto Rico’s most exciting up-and-coming writers.

Paperback | 120 pages | The Feminist Press at CUNY | 2024

Gabriel Carle is a writer and academic researching issues of queerness, Indigeneity, and Blackness in Caribbean literature and activism. They completed a BA in creative writing at the UPR, Río Piedras, and an MFA in creative writing in Spanish at New York University. Bad Seed is an English translation of their debut story collection, Mala Leche, published in Puerto Rico in 2018. They are currently based in New York City.

Heather Houde is a self-taught visual artist, writer, and translator from Philadelphia. She is the author of Thin Skinned, and her stories and translations have appeared in A Gathering of the Tribes, The Common, Latin American Literature Today, The Southwest Review, and The Shoutflower.