How to Shake the Other Man - Tapa blanda

Fiction. Seven years after leaving his father's home, Javier is growing increasingly restless as he works the streets of New York. But when he is taken in by Marcel, a boisterous, charismatic Cuban with a legion of street coffee vendors, their relationship evolves rapidly into something vital and sustaining. Determined to keep Javi around, Marcel implores his younger brother, a former boxer turned trainer, to turn Javier into a fighter. Oscar eventually gives in, and pushes the flighty young man towards his debut. But days before the match, Marcel is murdered. Bound together by tragedy and circumstance, Javier and Oscar must decide what they owe and want from each other in Marcel's absence. Raw and unrelenting, HOW TO SHAKE THE OTHER MAN is a bruising portrait of brotherhood and the void of love lost.

Derek Palacio was born in Evanston, IL, in 1982 but grew up in Greenland, NH. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His work has appeared in Puerto del Sol and The Kenyon Review, and his story "Sugarcane" was selected for inclusion in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a non-profit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Currently, he lives and teaches in Lewisburg, PA, where he is completing a novel about a small Cuban family struggling to remain whole after fleeing the island as part of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. He is also working on a collection of short stories relating to Cuba's past, present and future.