Dark Desires & The Others Pa

#xE2;#xAC;SHere I am,#xE2;#xAC; writes Luisa Valenzuela, #xE2;#xAC;Ssubmerged in a sea of notebooks . . .#xE2;#xAC; Dark Desires is the author#xE2;#xAC;"s autobiographical fantasia on the ten years she spent living in New York City. Valenzuela has called this book her #xE2;#xAC;Sapocryphal autobiography,#xE2;#xAC; and in it she says very little about her work as a writer, about the city itself, or even about literature. Instead, Dark Desires is a dialogue between the sometimes harmonious, sometimes contradictory worlds of writing and human interaction: for Valenzuela, writing, like love, is an attempt to reach out to another person, to make some sort of connection possible. Here, Valenzuela confronts her own #xE2;#xAC;Sdark desires#xE2;#xAC;: her need for sexual fulfillment and human tenderness, her indecisiveness about who or what she truly wants, and, overall, the compulsion to keep a written record of all her triumphs and disasters, encounters and obsessions.