You're the Only Friend I Need

Book excerpt: Fiction. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 2019 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Contest. 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.