GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Revelatory depiction of life in Buenos Aires slum is a tragi-comic triumph
A South American shanty town
[Leon Petrosyan/Creative Commons]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
Slum Virgin
by Gabriela Cabezon Camara
(Charco Press, £9.99)
IN THE El Poso slum of Buenos Aires things are starting to change for the better. Its inhabitants organise in special committees, they create a system of canals filled with large and glistening carp to eat, they grow their own vegetables and they are learning to be self-sufficient.
El Poso (“The Sediment”) is turning into a tiny utopia and all of this is apparently thanks to a strange cement Virgin Mary statuette — the Slum Virgin — that sends divine messages to the people through a “medium,” the transvestite prostitute Cleo, who renounces life on the game to try to save his shanty-town community from impending destruction.
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