You're the Only Friend I Need

By: Alejandro Heredia

 The stories in Alejandro Heredia's YOU'RE THE ONLY FRIEND I NEED offer new possibilities for transnational storytelling and the Dominican diaspora by centering Blackness and queerness. In these stories, friendship is a vehicle to understand what lies between and within people. A young Dominican immigrant makes an unlikely friend in her Bronx building. Two queer teens venture into the streets of Santo Domingo in search of queer belonging. A 20-something lost in existential thought finds a home in a gay Latin club. In Heredia's stories, friendship is at once balm, poison, wound, and respite from the troubles that society places on migrants, on queer people, on Black folks across the diaspora. YOU'RE THE ONLY FRIEND I NEED cuts through received notions and sings with emotional honesty and lyrical prose.