The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution by 
The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics by 
Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building by 
Fidel Between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema by 
The Hispanic Image in Hollywood by 
Hispanics in Hollywood: a celebration of 100 years in film and television by 
José Ferrer: Success and Survival by 
Latino Image Makers in Hollywood by 
Latino TV: A History by 
Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century by
Today's Latinx motion pictures are built on the struggles--and victories--of prior decades. Earlier filmmakers threw open doors and cleared new paths for those of the twenty-first century to willfully reconstruct Latinx epics as well as the daily tragedies and triumphs of Latinx lives. Twenty-first-century Latinx film offers much to celebrate, but as noted pop culture critic Frederick Luis Aldama writes, there's still room to be purposefully critical. In Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century contributors offer groundbreaking scholarship that does both, bringing together a comprehensive presentation of contemporary film and filmmakers from all corners of Latinx culture. The book's seven sections cover production techniques and evolving genres, profile those behind and in front of the camera, and explore the distribution and consumption of contemporary Latinx films. Chapters delve into issues that are timely, relevant, and influential, including representation or the lack thereof, identity and stereotypes, hybridity, immigration and detention, historical recuperation, and historical amnesia. With its capacious range and depth of vision, this timeless volume of cutting-edge scholarship blazes new paths in understanding the full complexities of twenty-first century Latinx filmmaking. Contributors Contributors Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou Frederick Luis Aldama Juan J. Alonzo Lee Bebout Debra A. Castillo Nikolina Dobreva Paul Espinosa Mauricio Espinoza Camilla Fojas Rosa-Linda Fregoso Desirée J. Garcia Enrique García Clarissa Goldsmith Matthew David Goodwin Monica Hanna Sara Veronica Hinojos Carlos Gabriel Kelly Jennifer M. Lozano Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez J. V. Miranda Valentina Montero Román Danielle Alexis Orozco Henry Puente John D. "Rio" Riofrio Richard T. Rodríguez Ariana Ruiz Samuale Saldívar III Jorge Santos Rebecca A. Sheehan
Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century by 
The Lost Cinema of Mexico: From Lucha Libre to Cine Familiar and Other Churros by 
The Queen of Technicolor by 
Reel Latinxs by
Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. But these cardboard cutouts and examples of lazy storytelling could never embody the rich traditions and histories of Latinx peoples. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dive deep into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture. As pop culture experts Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González show, the way Latinx peoples have appeared and are still represented in mainstream TV and film narratives is as frustrating as it is illuminating. Stereotypes such as drug lords, petty criminals, buffoons, and sexed-up lovers have filled both small and silver screens--and the minds of the public. Aldama and González blaze new paths through Latinx cultural phenomena that disrupt stereotypes, breathing complexity into real Latinx subjectivities and experiences. In this grand sleuthing sweep of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film that continues to shape the imagination of U.S. society, these two Latinx pop culture authorities call us all to scholarly action.
Revolving-Door Life Writing by 
Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film by 
The Boy with the Bookstore: A Novel by
Max Boyson looks good... from a distance. But up close and personal, the tattooed hottie Joelle Prima has been crushing on for the past year and half has turned into a stubborn toad. When she first learned about the massive renovation to the building they share, Joelle imagined that temporarily combining her Filipino bakery with Max's neighbouring bookstore would be the perfect opening chapter to their happily ever after. Can these sworn enemies find a way to put their business senses and feelings to the test?
The Neapolitan Sisters: A Novel by
A TODAY.COM MOST ANTICIPATED LATINX BOOK OF 2022! Three sisters. Three vastly different lives. A maelstrom of family secrets. For fans of Maria Amparo Escand n and Laurie Frankel, Margo Candela pens a riotous, provocative tale of family and sisterhood. Growing up with a kind but alcoholic father and a suspicious, passive aggressive mother, the Bernal sisters each developed their own way of coping- Dulcina had her art and drugs and alcohol, Claudia plunged into her studies and fled to Princeton, and Maritza watched one Disney movie after another in between devouring romance novels. Now all grown up, the sisters are reunited at last for Maritza's dream wedding. But they are no less different than they were growing up- Maritza is a princess bridezilla, Claudia is the family "fixer," and Dulcina "Dooley" is finally sober. With all three Bernal sisters back in their East L.A. home, each begins to take steps to come to terms with each other, their parents, and the secrets from their shared past. While their lives may have taken different paths, they are still sisters at heart. Told in alternating points of view, The Neapolitan Sisters is a humorous yet moving look at what it means to be a sister, daughter, and ultimately, your own self, despite the pressures that come with being part of a family.
Ramón and Julieta: Love and Tacos by
When fate and tacos bring Ramon and Julieta together on the Day of the Dead, the star-crossed pair must make a choice: accept the bitter food rivalry that drives them apart or surrender to a love that consumes them.
The Neapolitan Sisters: A Novel of Heritage and Home by
Growing up with a kind but alcoholic father and a suspicious, passive aggressive mother, the Bernal sisters each developed their own way of coping: Dulcina had her art and drugs and alcohol, Claudia plunged into her studies and fled to Princeton, and Maritza watched one Disney movie after another in between devouring romance novels.
Now all grown up, the sisters are reunited at last for Maritza’s dream wedding. But they are no less different than they were growing up: Maritza is a princess bridezilla, Claudia is the family “fixer,” and Dulcina “Dooley” is finally sober. With all three Bernal sisters back in their East L.A. home, each begins to take steps to come to terms with each other, their parents, and the secrets from their shared past. While their lives may have taken different paths, they are still sisters at heart.
Told in alternating points of view, The Neapolitan Sisters is a humorous yet moving look at what it means to be a sister, daughter, and ultimately, your own self, despite the pressures that come with being part of a family.
Good-Bye to All That by
When her Hollywood career goes haywire, a young woman must say good-bye to all that . . . or must she? Raquel Azorian has worked her way from temp to executive assistant and is this close to a promotion to junior marketing exec at Belmore Corporation, the media behemoth she's devoted herself to. She's learned to play the Hollywood game--navigate office politics, schmooze the right people, avoid the wrong ones, and maintain a sense of decorum even in the craziest of times. All she needs is for her boss to sign her promotion memo. Instead of putting pen to paper, he suffers a very public meltdown that puts not only his professional future but also Raquel's on the line. Getting to the next rung on the Belmore ladder will require every ounce of focus, but that's not going to be easy. Raquel's mom has decided to leave her husband and move into Raquel's apartment, and her older brother seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into depression. Raquel has to keep her job, stop her parents from divorcing, and save her brother. In the chaos of juggling so much, she finally reaches a breaking point: there's just not enough time for everything or for everyone. She's going to have to choose--success at work or happiness at home. But then a chance encounter at a bookstore café leads Raquel to start planning her own Hollywood ending . . . on her own terms.
More Than This: A Novel by
Sometimes what we have is not enough. She doesn't know his name and he doesn't know hers, but they just might be perfect for each other. Alexander Velazquez, an ambitious lawyer from a working-class neighborhood, and Evelyn Sinclair, a daughter of privilege trying to make it on her own, are strangers living parallel yet very different lives. Alex finds himself deeply entrenched in the life of an unredeemable client, and Evelyn realizes she's committed herself to a company with questionable ethics. They are both brokenhearted workaholics constantly trying to keep up with the demands of family and friends. What they both want is to find meaning in their lives; what they're doing is looking in the wrong directions. As they watch each other through their office windows, all they can do is wonder about what might happen if they took a chance on the stranger across the street.
And after All by
Poetry. Latinx Studies. "Rhina P. Espaillat's AND AFTER ALL combines the formal fluency of Richard Wilbur, the precision of Elizabeth Bishop, and the easy conversational tones of Frank O'Hara, and yet her poems speak in a voice that is distinctively her own. They address the loss of loved ones and loved things of the world, but their extraordinary empathy and gentle wit keep them from becoming depressing or sentimental. Savor this book and share it with people you love."--A. M. Juster "Rhina P. Espaillat, more than any living poet in English, gives ordinary language the glow of the sacred. Workaday words, trite with custom like thin coins, accrue new resonance and weight; plain objects are haloed with aureoles like figures in gold mosaics. Saints with their visions used to do this: wave away the veils that separate our shallow perceptions from a deeper reality. But not everyone is granted visions. How much harder it is to use the same words we all use and misuse, the same objects we all touch and ignore, common experiences we dismiss, and, by using words with precision, using the serendipity of rhyme, and the convention of metrical patterns, to give the reader the experience of revelation. Craft is not the opposite of inspiration, Espaillat reminds us, it is the only way to it."--A. E. Stallings "For most of its poems AND AFTER ALL is, as the title indicates, deeply elegiac in tone. There are many poignant evocations of the past in the book, rich with quotidian surface detail but always suffused with undemonstrative but palpably real emotion. A poem about the poet's grandmother, a tough no-nonsense farmer's wife who described how cows inarticulately but unmistakably grieved when they realized their calves were to be slaughtered, ends with the line, "She told it simply, but she faltered there." In its quiet pathos the line seems to sum up much of the book; exactness, no fuss, unforced fidelity to the anecdote, but the tremor of poignant empathy always present. A very eloquent collection of beautifully crafted poems, and one that it is hard to read dry-eyed."--Dick Davis
The Art of Exile by
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. In THE ART OF EXILE, William Archila asks readers in the United States to engage with a subject seldom explored in American poetry: the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s and its impact on Central American immigrants who now claim this country as home. In language that is poignant and often harrowing, the poet takes us on a journey from Santa Ana, El Salvador, to Los Angeles, California. Archila bridges race and class, metaphor and reality with astuteness, mingling humor and pain with a skill that denigrates neither.
Black Dove by
When established Chicana writer Ana Castillo witnesses her own son's spiralling adulthood and eventual incarceration, she describes a scene that could be any mother's worst nightmare. But in the US, it is a nightmare especially reserved for mothers like her. In Black Dove, she looks at what it means to be a single, brown, feminist parent in a world of mass incarceration, racial profiling and police brutality. Through startling humor and love, Castillo narrates some of America's most heated political debates and urgent social injustices through the lens of motherhood.
Bright Dead Things by
Finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award A Best Poetry Book of 2015: New York Times and Buzzfeed Bright Dead Things examines the chaos that is life, the dangerous thrill of living in a world you know you have to leave one day, and the search to find something that is ultimately "disorderly, and marvelous, and ours." A book of bravado and introspection, of 21st century feminist swagger and harrowing terror and loss, this fourth collection considers how we build our identities out of place and human contact--tracing in intimate detail the various ways the speaker's sense of self both shifts and perseveres as she moves from New York City to rural Kentucky, loses a dear parent, ages past the capriciousness of youth, and falls in love. Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a "huge beating genius machine" striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. "I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying," the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón's work is consistently generous and accessible--though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.
Catrachos: Poems by
The breathtaking debut collection from one of America's most inventive new poets A name for the people of Honduras,Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience. In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders--between life and death and between countries--invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story,Catrachosfinds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the "Queerodactyl," which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán's debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity--an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.
Chasing the Sun by
Andres suspects his wife has left him--again. Then he learns that the unthinkable has happened: she's been kidnapped. Too much time and too many secrets have come between Andres and Marabela, but now that she's gone, he'll do anything to get her back. Or will he? As Marabela slips farther away, Andres must decide whether they still have something worth fighting for, and exactly what he'll give up to bring her home. And unfortunately, the decision isn't entirely up to him, or up to the private mediator who moves into the family home to negotiate with the terrorists holding Marabela. Andres struggles to maintain the illusion of control while simultaneously scrambling to collect his wife's ransom, tending to the needs of his two young children, and reconnecting with an old friend who may hold the key to his past and his wife's future. Set in Lima, Peru, in a time of civil and political unrest, this evocative page-turner is a perfect marriage of domestic drama and suspense.
Conquistadora by
An epic novel of love, discovery, and adventure by the author of the best-selling memoir When I Was Puerto Rican. As a young girl growing up in Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de León. And in handsome twin brothers Ramón and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. She marries Ramón, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island. Ana faces unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos. But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda’s slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may be her destiny—a once-forbidden love—she will sacrifice nearly everything to keep hold of the land that has become her true home. This is a sensual, riveting tale, set in a place where human passions and cruelties collide: thrilling history that has never before been brought so vividly and unforgettably to life.
Dominicana by
Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn't matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year's Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wifeconfined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan's free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family's assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, go dancing with Cesar, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family. In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Angie Cruz'sDominicanais a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.
Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse by
"An enjoyably madcap journey through the wasteland of fame, popular culture, and feminine identity in a post-colonial world." -- Starred Review, Kirkus A macabre novel in verse of loss, longing, and identity crises following a poet who resurrects pop star Selena from the dead. Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Dreaming of You is an absurd yet heartfelt examination of celebrity worship. A young Latinx poet grappling with loneliness and heartache decides one day to bring Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla back to life. The séance kicks off an uncanny trip narrated by a Greek chorus of gossiping spirits as she journeys through a dead celebrity prom, encounters her shadow self, and performs karaoke in hell. In visceral poems embodying millennial angst, paragraph-long conversations overheard at her local coffeeshop, and unhinged Twitter rants, Lozada-Oliva reveals an eerie, sometimes gruesome, yet moving love story. Playfully morbid and profoundly candid, an interrogation of Latinidad, womanhood, obsession, and disillusionment, Dreaming of You grapples with the cost of being seen for your truest self.
The Five Wounds by
It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother's house, setting her life on a startling new path. Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby's first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo's mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel's mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda's uncle and keeper of the family's history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn't think he can live up to. The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as "legitimate masterpieces" (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
Floaters: Poems by
Martín Espada is a poet who "stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness," says Richard Blanco. Floaters offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love from one of the essential voices in American poetry.Floaters takes its title from a term used by certain Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over. The title poem responds to the viral photograph of Óscar and Valeria, a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Río Grande, and allegations posted in the "I'm 10-15" Border Patrol Facebook group that the photo was faked. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry as a tenant lawyer years ago, and now sings the praises of Central American adolescents kicking soccer balls over a barbed wire fence in an internment camp founded on that same bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love--even in the voice of a cantankerous Galápagos tortoise.The collection ranges from historical epic to achingly personal lyrics about growing up, the baseball that drops from the sky and smacks Espada in the eye as he contemplates a girl's gently racist question.Whether celebrating the visionaries--the fallen dreamers, rebels and poets--or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father's Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.
The Gravedigger's Archaeology by
The Gravedigger's Archaeology writes the urban landscape of the US immigrant, a figure constantly reminded of the nameless and the dispossessed who struggle back home in Central America. Moving between past and present, these poems record a vigil of loss left by the emptiness of tedious excavation'both psychological and spiritual. They travel the fragments and vestiges of a war, the return to one's homeland or place of childhood, unearthing the landscapes of a jazz riff, myth, or work of art. In a lyrical, sometimes elegiac language, the poems map the complex territory of an exile who understands the answers lie in the ground.
Hades, Argentina by
In 1976, Tomas is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he's moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. As the oppressive regime's thuggish milicos begin to disappear more and more people like her, she presents Tomas with a way to prove himself. But what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? Years later a summons arrives for him where he now lives in New York. But it isn't a homecoming that awaits him so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he's become and who he once aspired to be.
Her Body and Other Parties by
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction "[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange."--Roxane Gay "In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn't put it down."--Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Her Place in These Designs by
From her early childhood in the Dominican Republic, Rhina Espaillat learned the pleasures of traditional lyric poetry with wordplay, repetition, and patterns of sounds that allow for interplay between sound and sense. In this engaging and sensitive collection of poetry, she illuminates what is universal in women's lives and draws our attention to the humanly touching experiences.
A House of My Own by
From the author of The House on Mango Street, a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography--an intimate album of a beloved literary legend. From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The House on Mango Street to her abode in Mexico in a region where "my ancestors lived for centuries," the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, where she could truly take root, has eluded her. With this collection--spanning three decades, and including never-before-published work--Cisneros has come home at last. Ranging from the private (her parents' loving and tempestuous marriage) to the political (a rallying cry for one woman's liberty in Sarajevo) to the literary (a tribute to Marguerite Duras), and written with her trademark lyricism, these signature pieces recall transformative memories as well as reveal her defining artistic and intellectual influences. Poignant, honest, deeply moving, this is an exuberant celebration of a life in writing lived to the fullest.
In the Dream House by
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman--through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
The King Is Always above the People by
LONGLISTED for the 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION An urgent, essential collection of stories about immigration, broken dreams, Los Angeles gang members, Latin American families, and other tales of high stakes journeys, from the award-winning author of War by Candlelight and At Night We Walk in Circles. Migration. Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. In Daniel Alarcón's hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal." And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras", a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.
Knitting the Fog by
A young Guatemalan immigrant's adolescence is shaped by her journey to the US, as she grapples with Chapina tradition and American culture. Weaving together narrative essay and bilingual poetry, Knitting the Fog is the complex self-portrait of a young Chapina girl who wakes up to find her mother gone. When her mother returns three years later, they begin a month-long journey to El Norte. Once settled in California, Claudia has trouble assimilating - she doesn't speak English, and her Spanish is 'weird' - but when back in Guatemala, she is startled to find she no longer belongs there either. A harrowing story told with the candid innocence of childhood, Hernandez's memoir depicts the struggle and resilience inherent to immigration today.
LatiNext: The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 by
In the dynamic tradition of the BreakBeat Poets anthology,The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext celebrates the embodied narratives of Latinidad. Poets speak from an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space. Like Hip-Hop, we honor what was, what is, and what's next.
Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy by
It has been half a century since a few now-canonical Latin American writers introduced magical realism to the world. In that time, new generations of Latinx writers and artists have used that watershed moment as a springboard into new and bold explorations of speculative and fantasy forms. Collectively, they have found exciting new ways to delve into Latinx identities and cultures across genres. Latinx Rising, the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy by Latinxs living in the United States, exuberantly displays the full range of their art. The new and established voices assembled here (including Kathleen Alcalá, Carmen Maria Machado, Ernest Hogan, and other luminaries) invite us to imagine a Latinx past, present, and future that have not been whitewashed by mainstream perspectives. As in the best mixtapes, this anthology moves satisfyingly through the loud and brash, the quiet and thoughtful. There are ghosts, space aliens, robots--and a grandmother who unwittingly saves the universe through her cooking. The result is a deeply pleasurable read that pushes beyond magical realism and social realism to demonstrate all the thrilling possibilities of what Latinx literature can be.
Love War Stories by
Puerto Rican girls are brought up to want one thing: true love. Yet they are raised by women whose lives are marked by broken promises, grief, and betrayal. While some believe that they'll be the ones to finally make it work, others swear not to repeat cycles of violence. This collection documents how these "love wars" break out across generations as individuals find themselves caught in the crosshairs of romance, expectations, and community.
Made in Saturn by
These are the children of revolutions, and this is their story. This is the Caribbean. This is Argenis Luna: an artist who no longer paints, a heroin addict who no longer uses, and an overgrown child trying to make sense of his inheritance in a country where his once-revolutionary father is now part of the ruling elite. Thrown out of rehab in Havana, with Goya's tyrannical god Saturn on his mind, Argenis picks his way through the detritus of an abandoned generation: the drag queens, artists, hustlers and lovers trying to build lives amidst the wreckage. Mesmerising and visionary,Made in Saturn is a hangover from a riotous funeral, a rapid-fire elegy for the revolutionary spirit, and a glimpse of hope for all who feel eclipsed by those who came before them.
The Man Who Could Move Clouds by
A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER * From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy. "Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family's past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism... In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history."--New York Times Book Review For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets": the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the secrets," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to "the secrets." In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
Monkey Boy by
A Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction "Painful, refractive, beautiful . . . Goldman is beloved."--New York Review of Books In Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman's "brilliantly constructed auto-fiction" (NPR), we meet Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer grappling with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up as the son of immigrants--a Guatemalan Catholic mother and a Russian Jewish father--in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb. Told in an irresistibly funny, tender and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of family explores the pressures of living between worlds. Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, an American writer, has been living in Mexico when, because of a threat provoked by his journalism, he flees to New York City, hoping to start afresh. His last relationship ended devastatingly five years before, and he may now finally be on the cusp of a new love with a young Mexican woman he meets in Brooklyn. But Francisco is soon beckoned back to his childhood home outside Boston by a high school girlfriend who witnessed his youthful humiliations, and to visit his Guatemalan mother, Yolanda, whose intermittent lucidity unearths forgotten pockets of the past. On this five-day trip, the specter of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine - pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing ― as well as the dramatic Guatemalan woman who helped raise him, and the high school bullies who called him "monkey boy," all loom. Told in an intimate, irresistibly funny, and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of family and growing up "halfie," unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco came of age, and explores the pressures of living between worlds all his life. Monkey Boy is a new masterpiece of fiction from one of the most important American voices in the last forty years.
Native Country of the Heart by
Native Country of the Heart: A MexicanAmerican Geography is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe L. Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother's journey--from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's--she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth remnants of the MexicanAmerican diaspora and an American story of cultural loss.Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.
Notes on the Assemblage by
The Books We Love in 2016 - The New Yorker Best Poetry Collections of 2015 - The Washington Post Best Books 2015: Poetry - Library Journal Best Books of 2015 - NPR Books 16 Best Poetry Books of 2015 - BuzzFeed Books Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino Poet Laureate of the United States and son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in the migrant fields of California. Exuberant and socially engaged, reflective and healing, this collection of new work from the nation's first Latino Poet Laureate is brimming with the wide-open vision and hard-won wisdom of a poet whose life and creative arc have spanned chasms of culture in an endless crossing, dreaming and back again. "[This year] Juan Felipe Herrera's Notes on the Assemblage has been a ladder of hope ..."--Ada Limón, The New Yorker "Juan Felipe Herrera's family has gone from migrant worker to poet laureate of the United States in one generation. One generation. I am an adamant objector to the Horatio Alger myth of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, but Herrera's story is one of epic American proportions. The heads carved into my own Mount Rushmás would be Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Frida Kahlo, El Chapulín Colorado, Selena, and Juan Felipe Herrera. Notes from the Assemblage further carves out Herrera's place in American letters."--David Tomas Martinez "At home with field workers, wage slaves, the homeless, little children, old folks, artists, traditionalists, the avant-garde, students, scholars and prisoners, the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera is the real thing: a populist treasure. He will fulfill his appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate with the same high energy, savvy, passion, compassion, commitment and playfulness that his art and life's have always embodied. Bravo! Bravo!"--Al Young "While reporters can give you the what, when, and where of a war, a poet with the enormous gifts of Juan Herrera can give you its soul."--Ishmael Reed "I am proud that Juan Felipe Herrera has been appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, bringing his truthful, beautiful voice to all of us universally. As the first Chicano Laureate, he will empower all diverse cultures."--Janice Mirikitani "Herrera is ... a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone ... Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."--The New York Times "Herrera has the unusual capacity to write convincing political poems that are as personally felt as poems can be."--National Public Radio
Of Women and Salt by
AN INSTANTNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt. From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals--personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others--that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America's most tangled, honest, human roots.
Olga Dies Dreaming by
NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller * INTERNATIONAL LATINO BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots--all in the wake of Hurricane Maria ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, Vogue, Esquire, Book Riot, Goodreads, EW, Reader's Digest, and more! "Don't underestimate this new novelist. She's jump-starting the year with a smart romantic comedy that lures us in with laughter and keeps us hooked with a fantastically engaging story." --The Washington Post It's 2017, and Olga and her brother, Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo, are boldfaced names in their hometown of New York. Prieto is a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, while Olga is the tony wedding planner for Manhattan's power brokers. Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1 percent but she can't seem to find her own. . . until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets. Olga and Prieto's mother, Blanca, a Young Lord turned radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives. Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Xochitl Gonzalez's Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife, and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.
Our Lady of the Night by
From internationally-acclaimed novelist Mayra Santos-Febres comes a carnal, epic novel about the life of Isabel "La Negra" Luberza--a legendary Puerto Rican madam who, by the end of World War II, became the most powerful woman on the island. Born into poverty and then abandoned by her mother, Isabel "La Negra" Luberza blossoms into a supremely sensual young woman. Obsessed with attaining aristocratic status--armed with incredible physical presence, indomitable ambition, and keen intelligence--she meets Fernando Fornarís, the man who will forever change her life. With a parcel of land given to her by her rich, white married lover, Isabel transforms herself into a hard-edged and merciless businesswoman--abandoning her own newborn son to become Puerto Rico's most feared and respected madam, a collector of society's secrets, a queen of the notorious brothel that emerges as the island's true political and economic heart. Set against the rich backdrop of the Caribbean and the United States during the tumultuous years of World War II, Mayra Santos-Febres's Our Lady of the Night is a breathtaking novel of passion, power, and the devastating price of achieving everything one wishes for.
Sabrina and Corina by
A haunting debut story collection on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands, centered on Latinas of indigenous descent that shines a new light on the American West. Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Indigenous Latina characters and the land they inhabit. Set against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado-a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite-these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives- with caution, grace, and quiet force. In "Sugar Babies," ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth, but have the tendency to ascend during land disputes. "Any Further West" follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In "Tomi," a woman returns home from prison, finding herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, "Sabrina & Corina," a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual. Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.
San Juan Noir by
"Santos-Febres and 13 other contributors of Puerto Rican heritage take full advantage of San Juan's wide range of disparities between rich and poor, weak and powerful, tourists and residents, in this fine addition to Akashic's noir anthology series." --Publishers Weekly "A welcomed addition to the publisher's popular noir series, San Juan Noir has the distinction of being issued in two editions, English and Spanish, to more accurately reflect the Caribbean island's bilingual culture. Editor Santos-Febres gathers a varied collection of stories she expects will 'reveal a side of Puerto Rico otherwise obscured by the tourist trade and preconception.'" -- NBC News Latino "The stories within San Juan Noir stare right into the face of colonialism as they examine the gaps between the city's rich and its poor, its residents and its constant flow of tourists, its colorful exterior and its gritty underbelly. This is noir with a bite, noir that enthralls with its dark tales even as it challenges the reader--do better, do better, do better." --Literary Hub "From the interiors of sleazy bars or chic resort hotels, shabby apartments and in open streets and avenues with no escape, the tales of San Juan Noir trace the doomed routes of their victims and villains with an acute social and tragic awareness. These journeys keep the reader transfixed and understanding this Caribbean city in entirely new ways." --Insights Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Wilfredo J. Burgos Matos, Ernesto Quiñonez, Mayra Santos-Febres, José Rabelo, Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Ana María Fuster Lavín, Janette Becerra, Manolo Núñez Negrón, Tere Dávila, Edmaris Carazo, Alejandro Álvarez Nieves, Charlie Vázquez, and Manuel A. Meléndez. Translated by Will Vanderhyden. From the introduction by Mayra Santos-Febres: "Puerto Rico is often portrayed as sandy beaches, casinos, luxury hotels, relaxation, and never-ending pleasure--a place that satisfies all senses and appetites. Yet the city of San Juan is much more than that. The capital of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is the oldest Spanish settlement in all the territories and colonies of the United States. Since Puerto Rico is economically dependent on the US, the financial downturn of 2008 hit us hard. Many Puerto Ricans have left the island, looking for a better life. Crime has risen and the black market has thrived. As in many crises, art, music, and literature have also flourished. Never before has there been so much literary production. We have responded to our crisis with many stories to tell. And, especially in these times, many of those stories are noir... I hope these stories spark your imagination, and reveal a side of Puerto Rico otherwise obscured by the tourist trade and preconceptions. Maybe it will also pique your curiosity, and you will come visit our 'pearl of the Caribbean.'"
Song of the Water Saints by
“The circle of myth, history, longing, and grief inSong of the Water Saintswill envelop the reader as it does the lives of Nelly Rosario’s beautifully realized characters.” —Maureen Howard, author ofA Lover’s Almanac Poetic, transporting, and heartbreaking, this debut novel traces the lives of three generations of courageous Dominican women. First there is Graciela: a young girl rebelling against the strictures of her poor, rural life in the Dominican Republic in the early 1900s, she searches for her true destiny even as it lures her away from her husband and baby daughter. . . . Then there is Mercedes, passionately devoted to the Church, who rears herself after the death of her beloved stepfather, eventually marrying and moving with her husband to New York City, where she will bring up her granddaughter. . . . Coming of age in the freewheeling 1990s—and bringing the story full circle—Leila has without a doubt inherited the restless genes of great-grandmother Graciela. . . . The intimate details of life in New York and the Dominican Republic, the broad strokes of history, the subtleties of familial connection amid changing notions of home and obligation—all are rendered with grace and gritty realism in this remarkably accomplished novel.
This Is How You Lose Her by
Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award A Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012 Finalist for the 2012 Story Prize Chosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The LA Times, Newsday, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes bookstore, and many more... "Electrifying." -The New York Times Book Review "Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize... Díaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic." -O Magazine From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, these stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of love is forever."
Toys Made of Rock by
"This volume is a first collection of poems by Salvadoran-born poet, anthologist, and award-winning teacher José B. González. The poems deal with the immigrant experience and issues of identity, resilience, survival, and achievement" --
Trust by
Susan - this is checked out; not sure if you want to recall...
Unaccompanied by
"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."--Jamaal May "Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." --Glappitnova Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun." From "Let Me Try Again": He knew we weren't Mexican. He must've remembered his family coming over the border, or the border coming over them, because he drove us to the border and told us next time, rest at least five days, don't trust anyone calling themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra. He knew we would try again. And again--like everyone does. Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Vanishing Points / Puntos de Fuga : Contemporary Salvadoran Prose by
Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Latinx Studies. Edited by Tania Pleitez Vela, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Lucía de Sola. What do we mean when we refer to contemporary Salvadoran literature? As a response to this question the coordinating editors of this anthology present a selection of texts written in the 2000's by Salvadorans of different generations. Written in Spanish and translated into English (and, in some cases, vice versa), these prose pieces are true vanishing points; each one follows a unique trajectory. Although some authors revisit the effects of the country's civil war in the 80's, they do so from an angle that breaks from traditional testimonial literature; other authors depict the country's current situation. In this collection, the characters roam the mountains of wartime El Salvador, they transit gang-infested neighborhoods, they ride the rails atop The Beast that takes them to the United States; in El Salvador they hide their books as violence encroaches, they beg for coins on the streets of a small town, they are locked up in a military school, they float to the ceiling in a barren house. In other stories set in the era of globalization, characters navigate European or North American cities and places of dream-like wonder or of nightmares; the authors addresses universal subjects: egotism, violence against women, desire, and abandonment. This collection is an essential guide to the exploration of new trajectories in Salvadoran prose. Contributors: Ignacio Sarmiento Pérez (prologue), Miguel Huezo Mixco, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Carmen González Huguet, Rafael Menjívar Ochoa, Jacinta Escudos, Oscar García, Claudia Castro Luna, Harrison López, Nancy Gutiérrez, Elena Salamanca, Oscar Martínez, Ana Escoto, Olivia Olivia, Alejandro Córdova, Andreas Portillo. Translators: Lawrence Schimel, Dave Foxall, Marianne Choquet, Yesenia Santibañez, Harrison López, Jessica Rainey, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Emilie Delcourt, Daniela Maria Ugaz, John Washington, Lucía de Sola.
The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States by
Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint by popular demand this anthology of work by Central American writers living in the United States. The Wandering Song captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latinx groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a US publisher--perfect for high school, college, or university courses in US literature, Latinx literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies. A multi-genre collection featuring poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction, the anthology showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences: of refugees from the wars of the 1980s, of those who barely remember the homeland, and of those who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. It is a community that shares not only a history of violence--both here and back home--but the hope and healing that ensures its survival. The writers include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle--El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras--considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
What's Mine and Yours: A Novel by
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! An instant New York Times bestseller! A USA Today bestseller! Named a Best Book of 2021 by Amazon * Esquire * Marie Claire * Refinery29 * Kirkus * Redbook * Ms. Magazine * The Millions * Undomesticated Magazine * Paperback Paris "A once-every-few-years reading experience."--Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes "Coster portrays her characters' worlds with startling vitality. As the children fall in lust and love, grapple with angst and battle the tides of New South politics, Coster's writing shines"--New York Times Book Review From the author of Halsey Street, a sweeping novel of legacy, identity, the American family--and the ways that race affects even our most intimate relationships. A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the next twenty years. On one side of the integration debate is Jade, Gee's steely, ambitious mother. In the aftermath of a harrowing loss, she is determined to give her son the tools he'll need to survive in America as a sensitive, anxious, young Black man. On the other side is Noelle's headstrong mother, Lacey May, a white woman who refuses to see her half-Latina daughters as anything but white. She strives to protect them as she couldn't protect herself from the influence of their charming but unreliable father, Robbie. When Gee and Noelle join the school play meant to bridge the divide between new and old students, their paths collide, and their two seemingly disconnected families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And their mothers--each determined to see her child inherit a better life--will make choices that will haunt them for decades to come. As love is built and lost, and the past never too far behind, What's Mine and Yours is an expansive, vibrant tapestry that moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina, to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Paris. It explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.
While They Sleep (Under the Bed Is Another Country) by
Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY) refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María's aftermath. Written in dialogic fragments and interspersed with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, it is arranged around the two different discourses. The bed on which America sleeps, and which America has made, is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child's nightmare. Written in English, WHILE THEY SLEEP points to an imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, UNDER THE BED is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico.
Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed by
A Most Anticipated Book (Refinery29, HipLatina, Publishers Weekly, Latino Book Review, Elle, Al Día, and more)!Edited by The Bronx Is Reading founder Saraciea J. Fennell and featuring an all-star cast of Latinx contributors, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed is a ground-breaking anthology that will spark dialogue and inspire hope.In Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed, bestselling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora. These fifteen original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories and superheroes, to memories in the kitchen and travels around the world, to addiction and grief, to identity and anti-Blackness, to finding love and speaking your truth. Full of both sorrow and joy, Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed is an essential celebration of this rich and diverse community. The bestselling and award-winning contributors include Elizabeth Acevedo, Cristina Arreola, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Naima Coster, Natasha Diaz, Saraciea J. Fennell, Kahlil Haywood, Zakiya Jamal, Janel Martinez, Jasminne Mendez, Meg Medina, Mark Oshiro, Julian Randall, Lilliam Rivera, and Ibi Zoboi.
X/ex/exis by
Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet's gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose. In today's post-disaster Puerto Rico and a world shaped by the recurring waves of an ecological apocalypse, Salas Rivera's words feel visionary, mapping a decolonizing territory, a body, and identity of both soil and heart.
