Killing Me Softly »

Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco was born in Santiago de Chile in 1963 to an illiterate single mother who was a live-in maid. He grew up poor, the offspring of a military dictatorship, with an acquired taste for the bourgeoisie, boots, Catholicism, and queerness. In 1985, he disco-danced his happy-go-lucky feet to Vancouver, BC, where he promptly acquired his HIV, his Canadian citizenship (in 1991), his doctorate in Education from Simon Fraser University (in 1999), and an unending appetite for research, writing, and teaching. A sexual exile of sorts, he devotes many of his implausible tales to examining how desire geographically displaces individuals and infects lives. He lives, with his life partner John and ghosts of dead lovers and cats, in Vancouver where he leads a double life as a decent social scientist and an indecent author. He exercises a polite degree of AIDS activism as the Co-Chair of the Canadian Working Group on HIV and Rehabilitation.

With his first novel, Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers, Chilean-Canadian author Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco was heralded as a fearless writer-to-watch and short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Now comes Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando--twelve tales that rip the veils between the moral and the mundane, the prim and the grim, and rough trade--especially rough trade--and the men and women who love them too much and to no good end.

Genre-blurring and gender-bending, these stories of love gone wrong cement Ibáñez-Carrasco's reputation as one of Canada's reigning bad boys of lit. Here is the Canada that lies in the shadow of the maple leaf: demented drag queens, mail order brides, illegal aliens from everywhere--even out-of-this-world shapeshifters, machos y maricones, gringos and grifters, homeless squeegee kids, sons stalking fathers, people living with AIDS, third-string academics, fallen hand models, the hideously burned and the easily forgotten.