What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart?These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado's strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their "thoughts and prayers" will protect them from the world's violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. "The Great Escape" tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she's hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely.
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9780143135623
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Paperback
Velvet Was the Night
By Moreno-garcia, Silvia
1970s, Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger. Her next-door neighbor, Leonora, a beautiful art student, seems to live a life of intrigue and romance that Maite envies. When Leonora disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman - and journeying deeper into Leonora's secret life of student radicals and dissidents.Meanwhile, someone else is also looking for Leonora at the behest of his boss, ashadowy figure who commands goon squads dedicated to squashing political activists. Elvis is an eccentric thug who longs to escape his own life: He loathes violence and loves old movies and rock 'n' roll.
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9780593356821
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Hardcover
Eartheater
By Reyes, Dolores
Dolores Reyes Eartheater is an "outstanding" (New York Times) synthesis of mystery and magical realism that explores the dark tragedies of ordinary lives.. NAMED A MUST-READ AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS BY TIME, VULTURE, BOSTON GLOBE, COSMOPOLITAN, WIRED, AND MORE. Set in an unnamed slum in contemporary Argentina, this is the story of a young woman who finds herself drawn to eating the earth - a compulsion that gives her visions of broken and lost lives. With her first taste of dirt, she learns the horrifying truth of her mothers death. Disturbed by what she witnesses, the woman keeps her visions to herself. But when Eartheater begins an unlikely relationship with a withdrawn police officer, word of her ability begins to spread, and soon desperate members of her community beg for her help, anxious to uncover the truth about their own loved ones.. Surreal and haunting, spare yet complex, Eartheater is a dark, emotionally resonant tale told from a feminist perspective that brilliantly explores the stories of those left behind - the women enduring the pain of uncertainty, whose lives have been shaped by violence and loss.. Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches. "Dolores Reyess writing is visceral and urgent. Its also connected to a powerful tradition of fantasy and crime, and it reflects on violence against women with enormous lucidity." - Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire. "A raw and vital literary debut, Eartheater takes an unwavering and visceral look at systems of power through the perspective of a young woman caught in the crosshairs." - Shelf Awareness
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9780062987730
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Hardcover
The Murmur of Bees
By Segovia, Sofia
From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel - her first to be translated into English - about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution.From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can - visions of all that's yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous.
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9781542040495
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Hardcover
Space Invaders
By Fernández, Nona
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureA dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s ChileSpace Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella Gonzlez Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella's braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella's father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends -- from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme -- were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the "ghostly green bullets" they fired in the video game they played obsessively.One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernndez effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
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9781644450079
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Paperback
Infinite Country
By Engel, Patricia
At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting uncertainty of life in Bogot. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States. They travel to Houston and send earnings back to Elena's mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogot. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further.
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9781982159467
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Hardcover
The Inheritance of Orqudea Divina
By Córdova, Zoraida
The Montoyas are used to a life without explanations. They know better than to ask why the pantry never seems to run low or empty, or why their matriarch won’t ever leave their home in Four Rivers—even for graduations, weddings, or baptisms. But when Orquídea Divina invites them to her funeral and to collect their inheritance, they hope to learn the secrets that she has held onto so tightly their whole lives. Instead, Orquídea is transformed, leaving them with more questions than answers.
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9781982102548
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Book
The Last Great Road Bum
By Tobar, Héctor
In The Last Great Road Bum, Hctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a "road bum," an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Hctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum.A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson's freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador -- a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism.
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9780374183424
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Hardcover
A Spy in the Struggle
By Leon, Aya De
Success used to be this savvy lawyer's only rule. But now she's putting everything on the line to bring a killer corporation to justice.Since childhood, Yolanda Vance has forged her desire to escape poverty into a laser-like focus that took her through prep school and Harvard Law. So when her prestigious New York law firm is raided by the FBI, Yolanda turns in her corrupt bosses to save her career--and goes to work for the Bureau. Soon she's sent undercover at Red, Black, and Green--an African-American "extremist" activist group back in her California college town. They claim a biotech corporation fueled by Pentagon funding is exploiting the neighborhood. But Yolanda is determined to put this assignment in her win column, head back to corporate law, and regain her comfortable life .
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9781496728593
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Paperback
L.A. Weather
By Escandón, María Amparo
L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughtersClaudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her loversare blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way.
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9781250802569
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Book
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Diaz, Junot
Winner of:The Pulitzer PrizeThe National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardThe Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel PrizeA Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the YearOne of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, BOOKLIST , Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadOscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Daz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Daz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
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9781594489587
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Hardcover
Onion Skin
By Camacho, Edgar
Winner of Mexico's first ever National Young Graphic Novel Award!Rolando's job was crushing his soul... and then it crushed his hand. Now he can barely get out of the house, marathoning TV and struggling to find meaning. Nera is a restless spirit who loves to taste everything life can offer, but sleeps in a broken-down food truck and can't see a way to make her dreams come true. When their paths cross at a raucous rock show, the magical night seems to last forever. Together they throw caution to the wind, fix up the truck, and hit the road for a wild adventure of biker gangs, secret herbs, mystical visions, and endless possibilities. But have they truly found the spice of life? Or has Rolando bitten off more than he can chew?Onion Skin became a sensation in its native land for its twisty narrative, captivating characters, thrilling action, and delicious artwork.
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9781603094894
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Paperback
The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez
By Ruiz, Rudy
In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist's daughter. But as they'll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known.Thirty years after their first fateful encounter, Fulgencio Ramirez, RPh, is conducting his daily ritual of reading the local obituaries in his cramped pharmacy office. After nearly a quarter of a century of waiting, Fulgencio sees the news he's been hoping for: his nemesis, the husband of Carolina Mendelssohn, has died.
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9781982604615
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Hardcover
Cantoras
By Robertis, Carolina De
"Cantoras is a stunning lullaby to revolution - and each woman in this novel sings it with a deep ferocity. Again and again, I was lifted, then gently set down again - either through tears, rage, or laughter. Days later, I am still inside this song of a story." - Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning authorFrom the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family.In 1977 Uruguay, a military government crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In this environment, where the everyday rights of people are under attack, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression to be punished. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena - five cantoras, women who "sing" - somehow, miraculously, find one another. Together, they discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home, as they return, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow, or alone. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested - by their families, lovers, society, and one another - as they fight to live authentic lives. A genre-defining novel and De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn.
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9780525521693
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Hardcover
Little Eyes
By Schweblin, Samanta
A visionary novel about our interconnected present, about the collision of horror and humanity, from a master of the spine-tingling tale.They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of in Sierra Leone, town squares in Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. They're everywhere. They're here. They're us. They're not pets, or ghosts, or robots. They're real people, but how can a person living in Berlin walk freely through the living room of someone in Sydney? How can someone in Bangkok have breakfast with your children in Buenos Aires, without your knowing? Especially when these people are completely anonymous, unknown, unfindable. The characters in Samanta Schweblin's brilliant new novel, Little Eyes, reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls--but yet they also expose the ugly side of our increasingly linked world.
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9780525541363
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Hardcover
Love in the Time of Cholera
By Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
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9780307387141
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Paperback
Hades, Argentina
By Loedel, Daniel
In 1976, Toms Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Toms has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both It will be years before a summons back arrives for Toms, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn't a homecoming that awaits him, however, 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 has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.
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9780593188644
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Hardcover
Sabrina & Corina
By Fajardo-anstine, Kali
Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection - a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Indigenous Latina characters and the land they inhabit. 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 tend to rise 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 leaves prison and finds 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.Advance praise for Sabrina & Corina"Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart, believable in everything they said and did. How tragic that American letters hasn't met these women of the West before, women who were here before America was America. And how tragic that these working-class women haven't seen themselves in the pages of American lit before. Thank you for honoring their lives, Kali. I welcome them and you." - Sandra Cisneros "Kali Fajardo-Anstine's collection of stories, Sabrina & Corina, isn't just good, it's masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. . . . Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth. Comparisons came to mind: the Alice Munro of the high plains, the Toni Morrison of indigenous Latinas - but why compare her to anybody She is her own unique voice, and her work will easily find a place, not just in Latinx literature but in American literature and beyond." - Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents
Publisher: n/a
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9780525511298
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Hardcover
It Is Wood It Is Stone
By Burnham, Gabriella
Two women are drawn into a seductive web of power, displacement, sexuality, and other mysteries of the heart in this magnetic debut by a young Brazilian American author to watch. With sharp, gorgeous prose, It Is Wood, It Is Stone takes place over the course of a year in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in which two women's lives intersect. Linda, an anxious and restless American, has to Sao Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong . As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda's unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda's home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda's instability.
Publisher: n/a
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9781984855831
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Hardcover
The Grief Keeper
By Villasante, Alexandra
This stunning YA debut is a timely and heartfelt speculative narrative about healing, faith, and freedom.Seventeen-year-old Marisol has always dreamed of being American, learning what Americans and the US are like from television and Mrs. Rosen, an elderly expat who had employed Marisol's mother as a maid. When she pictured an American life for herself, she dreamed of a life like Aimee and Amber's, the title characters of her favorite American TV show. She never pictured fleeing her home in El Salvador under threat of death and stealing across the US border as "an illegal", but after her brother is murdered and her younger sister, Gabi's, life is also placed in equal jeopardy, she has no choice, especially because she knows everything is her fault. If she had never fallen for the charms of a beautiful girl named Liliana, Pablo might still be alive, her mother wouldn't be in hiding and she and Gabi wouldn't have been caught crossing the border. But they have been caught and their asylum request will most certainly be denied. With truly no options remaining, Marisol jumps at an unusual opportunity to stay in the United States. She's asked to become a grief keeper, taking the grief of another into her own body to save a life. It's a risky, experimental study, but if it means Marisol can keep her sister safe, she will risk anything. She just never imagined one of the risks would be falling in love, a love that may even be powerful enough to finally help her face her own crushing grief. The Grief Keeper is a tender tale that explores the heartbreak and consequences of when both love and human beings are branded illegal.
Publisher: n/a
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9780525514022
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Hardcover
Of Women and Salt
By Garcia, Gabriela
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.
Publisher: n/a
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9781250776686
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The New American
By Marcom, Micheline Aharonian
In this timely and emotionally powerful novel, award-winning author Micheline A. Marcom recounts the epic journey of a young Guatemalan-American college student, a "dreamer," who gets deported and decides to make his way back home to California. Emilio believes he is living the American Dream: his parents, who emigrated from Guatemala to California, sacrifice daily to ensure it. And his life seems relatively normal until he turns sixteen. Like most teenagers, Emilio is determined to get his driver's license - however, his mother discourages it. When Emilio asks why, his parents reveal a shocking secret: he is undocumented. Emilio adjusts to his new normal. He attends UC Berkeley. He falls in love. All is going well ... until Emilio gets into a car accident and - without a driver's license or any documentation - the policeman on the scene reports him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE].
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9781982120726
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Hardcover
Children of Chicago
By Pelayo, Cynthia
This horrifying retelling of the Pied Piper fairytale set in present-day Chicago is an edge of your seat, chills up the spine, thrill ride. When Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister's body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he's looking for payment he's owed from her. Lauren's torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a promise she made long ago with her sister's murderer. She may have to ruin her life by exposing her secrets and lies to stop the Pied Piper before he collects.
Publisher: n/a
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9781951709204
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Hardcover
We Are Not from Here
By Sanchez, Jenny Torres
A poignant novel of desperation, escape, and survival across the U.S.-Mexico border, inspired by current events.Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief.Pequea has her pride. And these three teens have one another. But none of them have illusions about the town they've grown up in and the dangers that surround them. Even with the love of family, threats lurk around every corner. And when those threats become all too real, the trio knows they have no choice but to run: from their country, from their families, from their beloved home.Crossing from Guatemala through Mexico, they follow the route of La Bestia, the perilous train system that might deliver them to a better life--if they are lucky enough to survive the journey. With nothing but the bags on their backs and desperation drumming through their hearts, Pulga, Chico, and Pequea know there is no turning back, despite the unknown that awaits them.
Publisher: n/a
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9781984812261
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Hardcover
Next Year in Havana
By Cleeton, Chanel
After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution...Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary...Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.READERS GUIDE INCLUDED
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9780399586682
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Paperback
Fiebre Tropical
By Lopera, Juliana Delgado
"Inventive and heady mixture of Spanish and English." - The White Review Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogot, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead. But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor's daughter. As her mother's mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
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9781936932757
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Paperback
Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer
By Figueroa, Jamie
In the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, in the aftermath of their mother's passing, two siblings spend a final weekend together in their childhood home. Seeing her brother, Rafa, careening toward a place of no return, Rufina devises a bet: if they can make enough money performing for privileged tourists in the plaza over the course of the weekend to afford a plane ticket out, Rafa must commit to living. If not, Rufina will make her peace with Rafa's own plan for the future, however terrifying it may be.As the siblings reckon with generational and ancestral trauma, set against the indignities of present-day prejudice, other strange hauntings begin to stalk these pages: their mother's ghost kicks her heels against the walls; Rufina's vanished child creeps into her arms at night; and above all this, watching over the siblings, a genderless, flea-bitten angel remains hell-bent on saving what can be saved.
Publisher: n/a
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9781948226882
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Hardcover
The Remainder
By Zeran, Alia Trabucco
Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile's dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela's childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents' violent militant past. The body of Paloma's mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.
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9781566895507
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Paperback
The Black Ghost
By Gallagher, Monica
Meet Lara Dominguez--a troubled Creighton cops reporter obsessed with the city's debonair vigilante--the Black Ghost. With the help of a mysterious cyber-informant named LONE, Lara's inched closer to uncovering the Ghost's identity. But as she searched for the breakthrough story she desperately needs, Lara will have to navigate the corruption of her city, the uncertainties of virtue, and her own personal demons. Will she have the strength to be part of the solution--or will she become the problem?Collects Black Ghost series one, #1-#5 in print for the first time.
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9781506724461
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Paperback
Drown
By Diaz, Junot
Drown is the debut short story collection from Dominican-American author Junot Daz and was published by Riverhead Books in 1996. Drown precedes his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her.
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9781573226066
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Paperback
Everything Inside
By Danticat, Edwidge
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love.Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose.This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart--a master at her best.
Publisher: n/a
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9780525521273
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Hardcover
A Luminous Republic
By Andres, Barba,
A new novel from a Spanish literary star about the arrival of feral children to a tropical city in Argentina, and the quest to stop them from pulling the place into chaos.
Publisher: n/a
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9781328589347
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Afterlife
By Alvarez, Julia
The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents "A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own." - Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves - lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack - but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including - maybe especially - members of our human family How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost
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9781643750255
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Hardcover
Mexican Gothic
By Moreno-garcia, Silvia
From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes a reimagining of the classic gothic suspense novel, a story about an isolated mansion in 1950s Mexico - and the brave socialite drawn to its treacherous secrets. He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noem. You have to save me. After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noem Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find - her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noem knows little about the region. Noem is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing.
Publisher: n/a
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9780525620785
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Hardcover
The Book of Unknown Americans
By HenrÃquez, Cristina
"A triumph of storytelling. Henrquez pulls us into the lives of her characters with such mastery that we hang on to them just as fiercely as they hang on to one another and their dreams. This passionate, powerful novel will stay with you long after you've turned the final page." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk A boy and a girl who fall in love. Two families whose hopes collide with destiny. An extraordinary novel that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American. Arturo and Alma Rivera have lived their whole lives in Mexico. One day, their beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, Maribel, sustains a terrible injury, one that casts doubt on whether she'll ever be the same. And so, leaving all they have behind, the Riveras come to America with a single dream: that in this country of great opportunity and resources, Maribel can get better.
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9780385350846
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Hardcover
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
By Enriquez, Mariana
Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken - fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history - with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
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9780593134078
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Hardcover
The House on Mango Street
By Cisneros, Sandra
Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes - sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous - it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
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9780679734772
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Paperback
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
By Contreras, Ingrid Rojas
"When women of color write history, we see the world as we have never seen it before. In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Ingrid Rojas Contreras honors the lives of girls who witness war. Brava! I was swept up by this story."--Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango StreetFor readers of Homegoing, a mesmerizing debut set against the backdrop of the devastating violence of 1990's Colombia about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them bothSeven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogot, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal. Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
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9780385542722
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Hardcover
Lost Children Archive
By Luiselli, Valeria
From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family's summer road trip across America--a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today.A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo--and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera--the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure--both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. Told through the voices of the mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images--including prior stories of migration and displacement--Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. Blending the personal and the political with astonishing empathy, it is a powerful, wholly original work of fiction: exquisite, provocative, and deeply moving.
Publisher: n/a
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9780525520610
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Hardcover
In the Time of the Butterflies
By Alvarez, Julia
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillos dictatorship. It doesnt have to. Everybody knows of Las MariposasThe Butterflies.In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sistersMinerva, Patria, Mara Teresa, and the survivor, Dedspeak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillos rule.
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9781565129764
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Print book
Dominicana
By Cruz, Angie
"Gorgeous writing, gorgeous story." -- Sandra Cisneros"An essential read for our times." -- Cristina GarciaFifteen-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 wife confined 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's Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.
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9781250205933
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Hardcover
Daughter of Fortune
By Allende, Isabel
Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaqun Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaqun takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him. So begins Isabel Allende's enchanting new novel, Daughter of Fortune, her most ambitious work of fiction yet. As we follow her spirited heroine on a perilous journey north in the hold of a ship to the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco and northern California, we enter a world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. A society of single men and prostitutes among whom Eliza moves--with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chien--California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence for the young Chilean. Her search for the elusive Joaqun gradually turns into another kind of journey that transforms her over time, and what began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom. By the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is. Daughter of Fortune is a sweeping portrait of an era, a story rich in character, history, violence, and compassion. In Eliza, Allende has created one of her most appealing heroines, an adventurous, independent-minded, and highly unconventional young woman who has the courage to reinvent herself and to create her own destiny in a new country. A marvel of storytelling, Daughter of Fortune confirms once again Isabel Allende's extraordinary gift for fiction and her place as one of the world's leading writers.
Publisher: n/a
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9780060194918
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Hardcover
Tears of the Trufflepig
By Flores, Fernando A.
One of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019"Funny, futuristic, phenomenal, Fernando A. Flores is from another galaxy. Fasten your seat belt. You are in for a stupendous ride." -- Sandra CisnerosA parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there's a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals -- species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous, surreal, psychedelic journey, where he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaa Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores's debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, a dire warning against the one percent's determination to dictate society's decline, and a nuanced investigation of loss. It's also the perfect introduction for Flores: a wonderfully weird, staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction, and a mythmaker of the highest order.
Publisher: n/a
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9780374538330
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Paperback
Love War Stories
By Rodriguez, Ivelisse
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.
Publisher: n/a
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9781936932252
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Paperback
The Anthill
By Pachico, Julianne
A wildly original blend of social horror and razor sharp satire, The Anthill is a searing exploration of privilege, racism, and redemption in the Instagram age.In the end, it's much easier to not look at the screaming feeling. To not examine it. Better to just keep on rushing on... Lina has come home to the country of her childhood. Sent away from Colombia to England after her mother's death twenty years before, she's searching for the one person who can tell her about their shared past. She's never forgotten Matty - her childhood friend and protector who now runs The Anthill, a day care refuge for the street kids of Medelln. Lina begins volunteering there, but her reunion with Matty is not what she hoped for. She no longer recognizes Medellin, now rebranded as a tourist destination, nor the person Matty has become: a guarded man uninterested in reliving the past she thought they both cherished.
Publisher: n/a
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9780385545891
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Hardcover
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau
By Zapata, Michael
The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New OrleansIn 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel titled Lost City. It is a strange and beautiful novel, set in a near future where a sixteen-year-old Dominican girl, not all that unlike Adana herself, searches for a golden eternal city believed to exist somewhere on a parallel Earth. Lost City earns a modest but enthusiastic readership, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she and her son, Maxwell, destroy the only copy of the manuscript.Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather's home when he discovers a mysterious package containing a manuscript titled A Model Earth, written by none other than Adana Moreau.Who was Adana Moreau How did Saul's grandfather, a Jewish immigrant born on a steamship to parents fleeing the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, come across this unpublished, lost manuscript Where is Adana Moreau's mysterious son, Maxwell, a theoretical physicist, and why did Saul's grandfather send him the manuscript as his final act in life With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Maxwell in New Orleans, which is caught at that moment in the grip of Hurricane Katrina. Unable to reach Maxwell, Saul and Javier head south through the heartland of America toward that storm-ravaged city in search of answers.Blending the high-stakes mystery of The Shadow of the Wind, the science fiction echoes of Exit West, and the lyrical signatures of Bolao and Mrquez, Michael Zapata's debut shines a breathtaking new light on the experiences of displacement and exile that define our nation. The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is a brilliantly layered masterpiece that announces the arrival of a bold new literary talent.
Publisher: n/a
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9781335010124
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Hardcover(Original)
The Other Americans
By Lalami, Laila
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efrain, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, a former classmate of Nora's and a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.
Publisher: n/a
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9781524747145
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Hardcover
Where We Come From
By Casares, Oscar
From the acclaimed author of Brownsville and Amigoland--a stunning and timely new novel about a Mexican American family in Brownsville, Texas, who reluctantly becomes involved in smuggling immigrants into the United StatesFrom a distance, the towns along the U.S.-Mexican border have dangerous reputations: on one side, drug cartels; on the other, zealous border patrol agents--and Brownsville is no different. But to twelve-year-old Orly, it's simply where his godmother, Nina, lives--and where he is being forced to stay the summer after his mother's sudden death.For Nina, Brownsville is where she grew up, where she lost her first and only love, and where she stayed as her relatives moved away and her neighborhood deteriorated. It's the place where she's buried all her secrets--and now she has another: she's providing refuge for a young immigrant boy named Daniel, for whom traveling to America has meant trading one set of dangers for another.Separated from the violent human traffickers who brought him across the border, pursued by the authorities, Daniel must stay completely hidden under Nina's roof. But when Orly discovers Daniel's presence, the two boys' immediate kinship--and shared desire for independence--puts them all at risk of exposure.Tackling the crisis of U.S. immigration policy from a deeply human angle, Where We Come From explores through an intimate lens the ways that family history shapes us, how secrets can burden us, and how finding compassion and understanding for others can ultimately set us free.
Publisher: n/a
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9780525655435
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Hardcover
It Would Be Night in Caracas
By Borgo, Karina Sainz
Told with gripping intensity, It Would be Night in Caracas chronicles one woman's desperate battle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of modern Venezuela and the lengths she must go to secure her future.In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcn stands over an open grave. Alone, she buries her mother - the only family she has ever known - and worries that when night falls thieves will rob the grave. Even the dead cannot find peace here.Adelaida had a stable childhood in a prosperous Venezuela that accepted immigrants in search of a better life, where she lived with her single-mother in a humble apartment. But now Every day she lines up for bread that will inevitably be sold out by the time she reaches the registers. Every night she tapes her windows to shut out the tear gas raining down on protesters. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida must make a series of gruesome choices in order to survive in a country disintegrating into anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But just how far is she willing to goA bold new voice from Latin America, Karina Sainz Borgo's touching, thrilling debut is an ode to the Venezuelan people and a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.
Publisher: n/a
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9780062936868
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Hardcover
Fracture
By Neuman, Andrés
Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrs Neuman's Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan's 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, a former electronics company executive and a survivor of the atomic bomb, has always lived like a fugitive from his own memories. He's spent decades traveling the world, making a life in different languages, only to find himself home again, living in Tokyo in his old age. On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Watanabe, like millions of others, is stunned by powerful tremors. A massive earthquake has struck to the north, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster -- and a stirring of the collective past. As the catastrophe unfolds, Watanabe's mind, too, undergoes a tectonic shift.
Publisher: n/a
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9780374158231
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Hardcover
Comemadre
By Larraquy, Roque
In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.
Publisher: n/a
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9781566895156
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Paperback
The House of Impossible Beauties
By Cassara, Joseph
NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY Buzzfeed * The Wall Street Journal * The Millions * Southern Living * Bustle * Esquire * Entertainment Weekly * Nylon* Mashable * Libary Journal * Thrillist"Cassarass propulsive and profound first novel, finding ones home in the world - particularly in a subculture plagued by fear and intolerance from society - comes with tragedy as well as extraordinary personal freedom." -- EsquireA gritty and gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and 90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is BurningIts 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the citys glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ball scene, where seventeen-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning inside of her to help create family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone.As mother of the house, Angel recruits Venus, a whip-fast trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito, a quiet boy who loves fabrics and design; and Daniel, a butch queen who accidentally saves Venuss life. The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work, addiction, and persistent abuse, leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them. All are ambitious, resilient, and determined to control their own fates, even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.
Publisher: n/a
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9780062676979
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Hardcover
Blue Flowers
By Saavedra, Carola
A novel of dark obsession, missed connections, and violent love.Marcos has just been through a divorce and moved into a new apartment. He feels alienated from his ex-wife, from his daughter, from society; everything feels flat and fake to him. He begins to receive letters at his new address from an anonymous troubled woman who signs off as A. and who clearly believes she is writing to the former tenant, her ex-lover, in the aftermath of a violent heartbreak. Marcos falls under the spell of the manic, hypnotic missives and for the first time in years, something moves him.Blue Flowers alternates between the letters detailing the dissolution of A.'s relationship, and Marcos' growing fixation with this damaged person. The letters become a kind of exorcism as both A.
Publisher: n/a
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9781594631757
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Hardcover
Big Familia
By Moniz, Tomas
Big Familia follows Juan Gutirrez, a self-employed single father, as he navigates a tumultuous year of inescapable change. His daughter, Stella, is on the verge of moving away to college; his lover, Jared, is pressing him for commitment; and his favorite watering hole - a ramshackle dive presided over by Bob the Bartender - is transforming into a karaoke hotspot. The story is set in a neighborhood that is also changing, gentrification inciting the ire of the established community. Upon the unexpected death of one of the bar's regulars, Juan is sent reeling, and a series of upheavals follow as he both seeks and spurns intimacy, pondering the legacy of distant parents and a failed marriage and grappling with his sexuality - all the while cycling and dating, drinking at Nicks Lounge, and parenting a determined and defiant child-become-woman.
Publisher: n/a
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9781946724229
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Paperback
Optic Nerve
By Gainza, Maria
"Optic Nerve is one of the best books I've read in years. How did Mara Gainza pull off something so risky when it never reads as anything less than delightful and engrossing This is a book that loosens the restraints on literature and gives us a new way of seeing." -- Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo's bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy.
Publisher: n/a
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9781948226165
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Hardcover
The Black Cathedral
By Gala, Marcial
Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fateThe Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral.
Publisher: n/a
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9780374118013
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Hardcover
How to Order the Universe
By Ferrada, Maria Jose
A richly imaginative debut, detailing a girl and her father finding their way -- and themselves -- while they work as traveling hardware salesmen in Pinochet-era Chile, is a rare work of magic and originality.For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D's life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father's trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies amid the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As she becomes part of a tight-knit community of fellow salesmen and grifters, M is regaled with parables and anecdotes that inform her "parallel education," D's excuse for letting her skip school without M's mother's knowledge. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M's memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts.
Publisher: n/a
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9781951142308
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Paperback
Sea Monsters
By Aridjis, Chloe
Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle-class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is "a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments" (Los Angeles Review of Books) .. One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking -- recklessness, impulse, independence.. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisas surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will "promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery." It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the "Beach of the Dead.". Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.. "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebalds or Cusks, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." -- Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
Publisher: n/a
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9781936787869
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Hardcover
The Mutations
By Comensal, Jorge
"Jorge Comensal's The Mutations oscillates masterfully between comedy and tragedy, gathering up in its pages a stupendous panoply of characters before whom the reader is never sure whether to smile in sympathy or pity." -- Fernando Aramburu, author of HomelandRamn Martinez is a militant atheist, successful lawyer, and conventional family man. But all of that changes when cancer of the tongue deprives him of the source of his power and livelihood: speech.The Mutations, by Jorge Comensal, is a comedy tracing the metastasis of Ramn's cancer through his body and in the lives of his family members, colleagues, and doctors, dissecting the experience of illness and mapping the relationships both strengthened and frayed by its wake. Mateo and Paulina, his teenage children, struggle with the temptations of masturbation and binge eating, respectively. Ramn's melancholic oncologist is haunted by the memory of a young patient whom he was unable to save. His selfish pathologist believes Ramn's tumor holds the key to a major scientific breakthrough. And then there's Elodia, Ramn's pious maid, who brings him a foulmouthed parrot as a birthday gift. This lewd bird becomes Ramn's companion, confidant, and unlikely double.Paying homage to the works of forebears such as Sontag, Didion, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, and filled with a rough-hewn poetry of regret, rage, and finally resignation, The Mutations offers a profound but funny cross section of modern Mexican life, as well as a bold treatment of an unspeakable yet universal reality
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9780374216535
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Hardcover
The Affairs of the Falcóns
By Rivero, Melissa
Winner of the 2019 New American Voices AwardLonglisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut NovelLonglisted for the Aspen Words Literary PrizeA Recommended Book of 2019 from:Southern Living * Buzzfeed * The Huffington Post * Bustle * Fierce * Hip Latina * Ms. Magazine * Alma * Library Journal * The Rumpus * The Millions * Refinery29 * Electric LiteratureA stunning debut novel about a young undocumented Peruvian woman fighting to keep her family afloat in New York City. Ana Falcón, along with her husband Lucho and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the familys opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama, and is stretched thin by unceasing shifts at her factory job. To make matters worse, Ana must also battle both criticism from Luchos cousin - who has made it obvious the family is not welcome to stay in her spare room for much longer - and escalating and unwanted attention from Mamas husband. As the pressure builds, Ana becomes increasingly desperate. While Lucho dreams of returning to Peru, Ana is deeply haunted by the demons she left behind and determined to persevere in this new country. But how many sacrifices is she willing to make before admitting defeat and returning to Peru? And what lines is she willing to cross in order to protect her family? The Affairs of the Falcónsis a beautiful, deeply urgent novel about the lengths one woman is willing to go to build a new life, and a vivid rendering of the American immigrant experience.
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9780062872357
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Paperback
Stubborn Archivist
By Fowler, Yara Rodrigues
"I read Stubborn Archivist in a ravenous gulp. It's stunning: so articulate about what it means to live between two languages and countries, tenderly unraveling the knots of unbelonging." - Olivia Laing, author of TheLonely City and Crudo For fans of Chemistry and Normal People: A mesmerizing and witty debut novel about a young woman growing up between two disparate cultures, and the singular identity she finds along the wayBut where are you really from? When your mother considers another country home, it's hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can't pronounce your name, it's hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it's hard to understand your place in the world. In Stubborn Archivist, a young British Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her - her mother, grandmother, and aunt.
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9780358006084
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Paperback
Empty Set
By Bicecci, Verónica Gerber
"Vernica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt." - Francisco Goldman"From the very beginning, Vernica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up at a loss for words. She alone could achieve this feat: because she's a visual artist who takes everything she reads in as concentric circles threaded with color, and because she writes essays on painters who write across canvasses and writers who paint plots from the realities of life. . . . She alone could bring the necessary silence to a novel so perfect it ended up leaving me speechless as well." - Jorge F. HernndezHow do you draw an affair A family Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave Can we fall in love according to the hop skip of an acrostic Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator's attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.
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9781566894944
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Paperback
The House of Broken Angels
By Urrea, Luis Alberto
The quintessential story of what it means to be the first generation to live two lives across one border, The House of Broken Angels is Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea's unforgettable portrait of the De La Cruz family as they celebrate the lives of two of their most beloved members over the course of one raucous and bittersweet weekend.NATIONAL BESTSELLER "All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life.Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home.Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels is Luis Alberto Urrea at his best, and cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank. "Epic . . . Rambunctious . . . Highly entertaining." --New York Times Book Review"A raucous, moving, and necessary book . . . Intimate and touching . . . the stuff of legend." --San Francisco Chronicle"Brilliant . . . Exceptional . . . The House of Broken Angels hums with joy." --NPR"An immensely charming and moving tale." --Boston Globe"A book about celebration that it, itself, a celebration." --Washington Post
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9780316154888
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Hardcover
Mouthful of Birds
By Schweblin, Samanta
A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star.Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection. Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.
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9780399184628
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Hardcover
Hippie
By Coelho, Paulo
If you want to learn about yourself, start by exploring the world around you. Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life: first on the famous "Death Train" to Bolivia, then on to Peru, later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.Paulo's travels take him farther to the famous Dam Square in Amsterdam filled with young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense, meditating and playing music, while discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness, and the search for an inner truth. There he meets Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find the ideal companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on the journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a personal transformation, changing their priorities and values along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship: a life-defining love story that awakens them on every level and leads to choices and decisions that will set the course for their lives thereafter.
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9780525655619
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Hardcover
The Crossed-Out Notebook
By Giacobone, Nicolas
Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo’s diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he’s written the previous day.
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9781501198748
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Book
Death Comes in through the Kitchen
By Dovalpage, Teresa
Don't let the authentic Cuban recipes fool you: This is no cozy mystery. Set in Havana during the Black Spring of 2003, a charming but poison-laced culinary mystery reveals the darker side of the modern Revolution.Matt, a San Diego journalist, arrives in Havana to marry his girlfriend, Yarmila, a 24-year-old Cuban woman whom he first met through her food blog. But Yarmi isn't there to meet him at the airport, and when he hitches a ride to her apartment, he finds her lying dead in the bathtub.With Yarmi's murder, lovelorn Matt is immediately embroiled in a Cuban adventure he didn't bargain for. The police and secret service have him down as their main suspect, and in an effort to clear his name, he must embark on his own investigation into what really happened. The more Matt learns about his erstwhile fiance, though, the more he realizes he had no idea who she was at all - but did anyone
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9781616958848
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Hardcover
The Neighborhood
By Llosa, Mario Vargas
A thrilling tale of desire and Peruvian corruption swirls around a scandalous expos that leads to murderFrom the Nobel Laureate comes a politically charged detective novel weaving through the underbelly of Peruvian privilege. In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori's presidency, two wealthy couples of Lima's high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail. One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposs. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru's unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest expos yet.Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, the novel swirls into the kind of restless realism that has become Mario Vargas Llosa's signature style. A twisting, unpredictable tale, The Neighborhood is at once a scathing indictment of Fujimori's regime and a crime thriller that evokes the vulgarity of freedom in a corrupt system.
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9780374155124
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Hardcover
Lawn Boy
By Evison, Jonathan
"Jonathan Evison's voice is pure magic. In Lawn Boy, at once a vibrant coming-of-age novel and a sharp social commentary on class, Evison offers a painfully honest portrait of one young man's struggle to overcome the hand he's been dealt in life and reach for his dreams. It's a journey you won't want to miss, with an ending you won't forget." --Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale For Mike Muoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work - and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew - he knows that he's got to be the one to shake things up if he's ever going to change his life. But how In this funny, angry, touching, and ultimately deeply inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man on a journey to discover himself, a search to find the secret to achieving the American dream of happiness and prosperity. That's the birthright for all Americans, isn't it If so, then what is Mike Muoz's problem Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it. And it's looking really good.Lawn Boy is an important, entertaining, and completely winning novel about social class distinctions, about overcoming cultural discrimination, and about standing up for oneself.
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9781616202620
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Hardcover
Nervous System
By Meruane, Lina
Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the "country of the present" but she is from the "country of the past," a place burdened in her memory by both personal and political tragedies. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writer's block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.As Ella's anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn.
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9781644450550
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Paperback
Songs for the Flames
By Vásquez, Juan Gabriel
The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing - but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour-de-force piece, the search for a book leads a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it - and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan.Juan Gabriel Vsquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others.
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9780593190135
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Hardcover
The Five Wounds
By Quade, Kirstin Valdez
From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following a New Mexican family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.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. Their reunion sets her own life down a startling path.Vivid, tender, darkly 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, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving To Tve, keeper of the family's history.
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9780393242836
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Hardcover
The Taste of Sugar
By Vera, Marisel
Marisel Vera emerges as a major voice of contemporary fiction with a heart- wrenching novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War. It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the great San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899 bring devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured, along with thousands of other puertorriquenos, to the sugar plantations of Hawaii -- another US territory -- where they are confronted by the hollowness of America's promises of prosperity.
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9781631497735
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Hardcover
You Had Me at Hola
By Daria, Alexis
"Soapy, smart and so sexy... with vibrant characters and electric chemistry comparable to the telenovelas that inspired it, you'll be thrilled You Had Me At Hola doesn't come with commercials!"--Sarah MacLean, New York Times bestselling authorRITA Award Winning author Alexis Daria brings readers an unforgettable, hilarious rom-com set in the drama-filled world of telenovelas - perfect for fans of Jane the Virgin and The Kiss Quotient.Leading Ladies do not end up on tabloid covers. After a messy public breakup, soap opera darling Jasmine Lin Rodriguez finds her face splashed across the tabloids. When she returns to her hometown of New York City to film the starring role in a bilingual romantic comedy for the number one streaming service in the country, Jasmine figures her new "Leading Lady Plan" should be easy enough to follow - until a casting shake-up pairs her with telenovela hunk Ashton Surez.
The Rock Eaters
By Peynado, Brenda
What does it mean to be other? What does it mean to love in a world determined to keep us apart?These questions murmur in the heart of each of Brenda Peynado's strange and singular stories. Threaded with magic, transcending time and place, these stories explore what it means to cross borders and break down walls, personally and politically. In one story, suburban families perform oblations to cattlelike angels who live on their roofs, believing that their "thoughts and prayers" will protect them from the world's violence. In another, inhabitants of an unnamed dictatorship slowly lose their own agency as pieces of their bodies go missing and, with them, the essential rights that those appendages serve. "The Great Escape" tells of an old woman who hides away in her apartment, reliving the past among beautiful objects she's hoarded, refusing all visitors, until she disappears completely.
Velvet Was the Night
By Moreno-garcia, Silvia
1970s, Mexico City. Maite is a secretary who lives for one thing: the latest issue of Secret Romance. While student protests and political unrest consume the city, Maite escapes into stories of passion and danger. Her next-door neighbor, Leonora, a beautiful art student, seems to live a life of intrigue and romance that Maite envies. When Leonora disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman - and journeying deeper into Leonora's secret life of student radicals and dissidents.Meanwhile, someone else is also looking for Leonora at the behest of his boss, ashadowy figure who commands goon squads dedicated to squashing political activists. Elvis is an eccentric thug who longs to escape his own life: He loathes violence and loves old movies and rock 'n' roll.
Eartheater
By Reyes, Dolores
Dolores Reyes Eartheater is an "outstanding" (New York Times) synthesis of mystery and magical realism that explores the dark tragedies of ordinary lives.. NAMED A MUST-READ AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS BY TIME, VULTURE, BOSTON GLOBE, COSMOPOLITAN, WIRED, AND MORE. Set in an unnamed slum in contemporary Argentina, this is the story of a young woman who finds herself drawn to eating the earth - a compulsion that gives her visions of broken and lost lives. With her first taste of dirt, she learns the horrifying truth of her mothers death. Disturbed by what she witnesses, the woman keeps her visions to herself. But when Eartheater begins an unlikely relationship with a withdrawn police officer, word of her ability begins to spread, and soon desperate members of her community beg for her help, anxious to uncover the truth about their own loved ones.. Surreal and haunting, spare yet complex, Eartheater is a dark, emotionally resonant tale told from a feminist perspective that brilliantly explores the stories of those left behind - the women enduring the pain of uncertainty, whose lives have been shaped by violence and loss.. Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches. "Dolores Reyess writing is visceral and urgent. Its also connected to a powerful tradition of fantasy and crime, and it reflects on violence against women with enormous lucidity." - Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire. "A raw and vital literary debut, Eartheater takes an unwavering and visceral look at systems of power through the perspective of a young woman caught in the crosshairs." - Shelf Awareness
The Murmur of Bees
By Segovia, Sofia
From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel - her first to be translated into English - about a mysterious child with the power to change a family's history in a country on the verge of revolution.From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can - visions of all that's yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous.
Space Invaders
By Fernández, Nona
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated LiteratureA dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s ChileSpace Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella Gonzlez Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella's braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella's father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of her after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends -- from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme -- were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the "ghostly green bullets" they fired in the video game they played obsessively.One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernndez effortlessly builds a choral and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
Infinite Country
By Engel, Patricia
At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting uncertainty of life in Bogot. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States. They travel to Houston and send earnings back to Elena's mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogot. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further.
The Inheritance of Orqudea Divina
By Córdova, Zoraida
The Montoyas are used to a life without explanations. They know better than to ask why the pantry never seems to run low or empty, or why their matriarch won’t ever leave their home in Four Rivers—even for graduations, weddings, or baptisms. But when Orquídea Divina invites them to her funeral and to collect their inheritance, they hope to learn the secrets that she has held onto so tightly their whole lives. Instead, Orquídea is transformed, leaving them with more questions than answers.
The Last Great Road Bum
By Tobar, Héctor
In The Last Great Road Bum, Hctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a "road bum," an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Hctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum.A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson's freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador -- a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism.
A Spy in the Struggle
By Leon, Aya De
Success used to be this savvy lawyer's only rule. But now she's putting everything on the line to bring a killer corporation to justice.Since childhood, Yolanda Vance has forged her desire to escape poverty into a laser-like focus that took her through prep school and Harvard Law. So when her prestigious New York law firm is raided by the FBI, Yolanda turns in her corrupt bosses to save her career--and goes to work for the Bureau. Soon she's sent undercover at Red, Black, and Green--an African-American "extremist" activist group back in her California college town. They claim a biotech corporation fueled by Pentagon funding is exploiting the neighborhood. But Yolanda is determined to put this assignment in her win column, head back to corporate law, and regain her comfortable life .
L.A. Weather
By Escandón, María Amparo
L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughtersClaudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her loversare blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Diaz, Junot
Winner of:The Pulitzer PrizeThe National Book Critics Circle AwardThe Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardThe Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel PrizeA Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the YearOne of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, BOOKLIST , Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadOscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Daz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Daz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.
Onion Skin
By Camacho, Edgar
Winner of Mexico's first ever National Young Graphic Novel Award!Rolando's job was crushing his soul... and then it crushed his hand. Now he can barely get out of the house, marathoning TV and struggling to find meaning. Nera is a restless spirit who loves to taste everything life can offer, but sleeps in a broken-down food truck and can't see a way to make her dreams come true. When their paths cross at a raucous rock show, the magical night seems to last forever. Together they throw caution to the wind, fix up the truck, and hit the road for a wild adventure of biker gangs, secret herbs, mystical visions, and endless possibilities. But have they truly found the spice of life? Or has Rolando bitten off more than he can chew?Onion Skin became a sensation in its native land for its twisty narrative, captivating characters, thrilling action, and delicious artwork.
The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez
By Ruiz, Rudy
In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist's daughter. But as they'll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known.Thirty years after their first fateful encounter, Fulgencio Ramirez, RPh, is conducting his daily ritual of reading the local obituaries in his cramped pharmacy office. After nearly a quarter of a century of waiting, Fulgencio sees the news he's been hoping for: his nemesis, the husband of Carolina Mendelssohn, has died.
Cantoras
By Robertis, Carolina De
"Cantoras is a stunning lullaby to revolution - and each woman in this novel sings it with a deep ferocity. Again and again, I was lifted, then gently set down again - either through tears, rage, or laughter. Days later, I am still inside this song of a story." - Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning authorFrom the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family.In 1977 Uruguay, a military government crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In this environment, where the everyday rights of people are under attack, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression to be punished. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena - five cantoras, women who "sing" - somehow, miraculously, find one another. Together, they discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home, as they return, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow, or alone. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested - by their families, lovers, society, and one another - as they fight to live authentic lives. A genre-defining novel and De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn.
Little Eyes
By Schweblin, Samanta
A visionary novel about our interconnected present, about the collision of horror and humanity, from a master of the spine-tingling tale.They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of in Sierra Leone, town squares in Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. They're everywhere. They're here. They're us. They're not pets, or ghosts, or robots. They're real people, but how can a person living in Berlin walk freely through the living room of someone in Sydney? How can someone in Bangkok have breakfast with your children in Buenos Aires, without your knowing? Especially when these people are completely anonymous, unknown, unfindable. The characters in Samanta Schweblin's brilliant new novel, Little Eyes, reveal the beauty of connection between far-flung souls--but yet they also expose the ugly side of our increasingly linked world.
Love in the Time of Cholera
By Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
Hades, Argentina
By Loedel, Daniel
In 1976, Toms Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Toms has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both It will be years before a summons back arrives for Toms, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn't a homecoming that awaits him, however, 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 has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.
Sabrina & Corina
By Fajardo-anstine, Kali
Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection - a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Indigenous Latina characters and the land they inhabit. 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 tend to rise 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 leaves prison and finds 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.Advance praise for Sabrina & Corina"Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart, believable in everything they said and did. How tragic that American letters hasn't met these women of the West before, women who were here before America was America. And how tragic that these working-class women haven't seen themselves in the pages of American lit before. Thank you for honoring their lives, Kali. I welcome them and you." - Sandra Cisneros "Kali Fajardo-Anstine's collection of stories, Sabrina & Corina, isn't just good, it's masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. . . . Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth. Comparisons came to mind: the Alice Munro of the high plains, the Toni Morrison of indigenous Latinas - but why compare her to anybody She is her own unique voice, and her work will easily find a place, not just in Latinx literature but in American literature and beyond." - Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents
It Is Wood It Is Stone
By Burnham, Gabriella
Two women are drawn into a seductive web of power, displacement, sexuality, and other mysteries of the heart in this magnetic debut by a young Brazilian American author to watch. With sharp, gorgeous prose, It Is Wood, It Is Stone takes place over the course of a year in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in which two women's lives intersect. Linda, an anxious and restless American, has to Sao Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong . As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda's unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda's home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda's instability.
The Grief Keeper
By Villasante, Alexandra
This stunning YA debut is a timely and heartfelt speculative narrative about healing, faith, and freedom.Seventeen-year-old Marisol has always dreamed of being American, learning what Americans and the US are like from television and Mrs. Rosen, an elderly expat who had employed Marisol's mother as a maid. When she pictured an American life for herself, she dreamed of a life like Aimee and Amber's, the title characters of her favorite American TV show. She never pictured fleeing her home in El Salvador under threat of death and stealing across the US border as "an illegal", but after her brother is murdered and her younger sister, Gabi's, life is also placed in equal jeopardy, she has no choice, especially because she knows everything is her fault. If she had never fallen for the charms of a beautiful girl named Liliana, Pablo might still be alive, her mother wouldn't be in hiding and she and Gabi wouldn't have been caught crossing the border. But they have been caught and their asylum request will most certainly be denied. With truly no options remaining, Marisol jumps at an unusual opportunity to stay in the United States. She's asked to become a grief keeper, taking the grief of another into her own body to save a life. It's a risky, experimental study, but if it means Marisol can keep her sister safe, she will risk anything. She just never imagined one of the risks would be falling in love, a love that may even be powerful enough to finally help her face her own crushing grief. The Grief Keeper is a tender tale that explores the heartbreak and consequences of when both love and human beings are branded illegal.
Of Women and Salt
By Garcia, Gabriela
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.
The New American
By Marcom, Micheline Aharonian
In this timely and emotionally powerful novel, award-winning author Micheline A. Marcom recounts the epic journey of a young Guatemalan-American college student, a "dreamer," who gets deported and decides to make his way back home to California. Emilio believes he is living the American Dream: his parents, who emigrated from Guatemala to California, sacrifice daily to ensure it. And his life seems relatively normal until he turns sixteen. Like most teenagers, Emilio is determined to get his driver's license - however, his mother discourages it. When Emilio asks why, his parents reveal a shocking secret: he is undocumented. Emilio adjusts to his new normal. He attends UC Berkeley. He falls in love. All is going well ... until Emilio gets into a car accident and - without a driver's license or any documentation - the policeman on the scene reports him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE].
Children of Chicago
By Pelayo, Cynthia
This horrifying retelling of the Pied Piper fairytale set in present-day Chicago is an edge of your seat, chills up the spine, thrill ride. When Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister's body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he's looking for payment he's owed from her. Lauren's torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a promise she made long ago with her sister's murderer. She may have to ruin her life by exposing her secrets and lies to stop the Pied Piper before he collects.
We Are Not from Here
By Sanchez, Jenny Torres
A poignant novel of desperation, escape, and survival across the U.S.-Mexico border, inspired by current events.Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief.Pequea has her pride. And these three teens have one another. But none of them have illusions about the town they've grown up in and the dangers that surround them. Even with the love of family, threats lurk around every corner. And when those threats become all too real, the trio knows they have no choice but to run: from their country, from their families, from their beloved home.Crossing from Guatemala through Mexico, they follow the route of La Bestia, the perilous train system that might deliver them to a better life--if they are lucky enough to survive the journey. With nothing but the bags on their backs and desperation drumming through their hearts, Pulga, Chico, and Pequea know there is no turning back, despite the unknown that awaits them.
Next Year in Havana
By Cleeton, Chanel
After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution...Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary...Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa's last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba's tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she'll need the lessons of her grandmother's past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.READERS GUIDE INCLUDED
Fiebre Tropical
By Lopera, Juliana Delgado
"Inventive and heady mixture of Spanish and English." - The White Review Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogot, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead. But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor's daughter. As her mother's mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer
By Figueroa, Jamie
In the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, in the aftermath of their mother's passing, two siblings spend a final weekend together in their childhood home. Seeing her brother, Rafa, careening toward a place of no return, Rufina devises a bet: if they can make enough money performing for privileged tourists in the plaza over the course of the weekend to afford a plane ticket out, Rafa must commit to living. If not, Rufina will make her peace with Rafa's own plan for the future, however terrifying it may be.As the siblings reckon with generational and ancestral trauma, set against the indignities of present-day prejudice, other strange hauntings begin to stalk these pages: their mother's ghost kicks her heels against the walls; Rufina's vanished child creeps into her arms at night; and above all this, watching over the siblings, a genderless, flea-bitten angel remains hell-bent on saving what can be saved.
The Remainder
By Zeran, Alia Trabucco
Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile's dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela's childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents' violent militant past. The body of Paloma's mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.
The Black Ghost
By Gallagher, Monica
Meet Lara Dominguez--a troubled Creighton cops reporter obsessed with the city's debonair vigilante--the Black Ghost. With the help of a mysterious cyber-informant named LONE, Lara's inched closer to uncovering the Ghost's identity. But as she searched for the breakthrough story she desperately needs, Lara will have to navigate the corruption of her city, the uncertainties of virtue, and her own personal demons. Will she have the strength to be part of the solution--or will she become the problem?Collects Black Ghost series one, #1-#5 in print for the first time.
Drown
By Diaz, Junot
Drown is the debut short story collection from Dominican-American author Junot Daz and was published by Riverhead Books in 1996. Drown precedes his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the short story collection This Is How You Lose Her.
Everything Inside
By Danticat, Edwidge
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love.Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose.This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart--a master at her best.
A Luminous Republic
By Andres, Barba,
A new novel from a Spanish literary star about the arrival of feral children to a tropical city in Argentina, and the quest to stop them from pulling the place into chaos.
Afterlife
By Alvarez, Julia
The first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents "A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own." - Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves - lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack - but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including - maybe especially - members of our human family How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost
Mexican Gothic
By Moreno-garcia, Silvia
From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes a reimagining of the classic gothic suspense novel, a story about an isolated mansion in 1950s Mexico - and the brave socialite drawn to its treacherous secrets. He is trying to poison me. You must come for me, Noem. You have to save me. After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noem Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find - her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noem knows little about the region. Noem is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing.
The Book of Unknown Americans
By HenrÃquez, Cristina
"A triumph of storytelling. Henrquez pulls us into the lives of her characters with such mastery that we hang on to them just as fiercely as they hang on to one another and their dreams. This passionate, powerful novel will stay with you long after you've turned the final page." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk A boy and a girl who fall in love. Two families whose hopes collide with destiny. An extraordinary novel that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American. Arturo and Alma Rivera have lived their whole lives in Mexico. One day, their beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, Maribel, sustains a terrible injury, one that casts doubt on whether she'll ever be the same. And so, leaving all they have behind, the Riveras come to America with a single dream: that in this country of great opportunity and resources, Maribel can get better.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
By Enriquez, Mariana
Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken - fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history - with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
The House on Mango Street
By Cisneros, Sandra
Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes - sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous - it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
By Contreras, Ingrid Rojas
"When women of color write history, we see the world as we have never seen it before. In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Ingrid Rojas Contreras honors the lives of girls who witness war. Brava! I was swept up by this story."--Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango StreetFor readers of Homegoing, a mesmerizing debut set against the backdrop of the devastating violence of 1990's Colombia about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them bothSeven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogot, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal. Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
Lost Children Archive
By Luiselli, Valeria
From the two-time NBCC Finalist, a fiercely imaginative novel about a family's summer road trip across America--a journey that, with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity, probes the nature of justice and equality in America today.A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo--and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera--the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an "inventory of echoes" from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure--both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. Told through the voices of the mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images--including prior stories of migration and displacement--Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. Blending the personal and the political with astonishing empathy, it is a powerful, wholly original work of fiction: exquisite, provocative, and deeply moving.
In the Time of the Butterflies
By Alvarez, Julia
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillos dictatorship. It doesnt have to. Everybody knows of Las MariposasThe Butterflies.In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sistersMinerva, Patria, Mara Teresa, and the survivor, Dedspeak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillos rule.
Dominicana
By Cruz, Angie
"Gorgeous writing, gorgeous story." -- Sandra Cisneros"An essential read for our times." -- Cristina GarciaFifteen-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 wife confined 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's Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.
Daughter of Fortune
By Allende, Isabel
Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaqun Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaqun takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him. So begins Isabel Allende's enchanting new novel, Daughter of Fortune, her most ambitious work of fiction yet. As we follow her spirited heroine on a perilous journey north in the hold of a ship to the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco and northern California, we enter a world whose newly arrived inhabitants are driven mad by gold fever. A society of single men and prostitutes among whom Eliza moves--with the help of her good friend and savior, the Chinese doctor Tao Chien--California opens the door to a new life of freedom and independence for the young Chilean. Her search for the elusive Joaqun gradually turns into another kind of journey that transforms her over time, and what began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom. By the time she finally hears news of him, Eliza must decide who her true love really is. Daughter of Fortune is a sweeping portrait of an era, a story rich in character, history, violence, and compassion. In Eliza, Allende has created one of her most appealing heroines, an adventurous, independent-minded, and highly unconventional young woman who has the courage to reinvent herself and to create her own destiny in a new country. A marvel of storytelling, Daughter of Fortune confirms once again Isabel Allende's extraordinary gift for fiction and her place as one of the world's leading writers.
Tears of the Trufflepig
By Flores, Fernando A.
One of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019"Funny, futuristic, phenomenal, Fernando A. Flores is from another galaxy. Fasten your seat belt. You are in for a stupendous ride." -- Sandra CisnerosA parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there's a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals -- species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous, surreal, psychedelic journey, where he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaa Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores's debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, a dire warning against the one percent's determination to dictate society's decline, and a nuanced investigation of loss. It's also the perfect introduction for Flores: a wonderfully weird, staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction, and a mythmaker of the highest order.
Love War Stories
By Rodriguez, Ivelisse
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.
The Anthill
By Pachico, Julianne
A wildly original blend of social horror and razor sharp satire, The Anthill is a searing exploration of privilege, racism, and redemption in the Instagram age.In the end, it's much easier to not look at the screaming feeling. To not examine it. Better to just keep on rushing on... Lina has come home to the country of her childhood. Sent away from Colombia to England after her mother's death twenty years before, she's searching for the one person who can tell her about their shared past. She's never forgotten Matty - her childhood friend and protector who now runs The Anthill, a day care refuge for the street kids of Medelln. Lina begins volunteering there, but her reunion with Matty is not what she hoped for. She no longer recognizes Medellin, now rebranded as a tourist destination, nor the person Matty has become: a guarded man uninterested in reliving the past she thought they both cherished.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau
By Zapata, Michael
The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New OrleansIn 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel titled Lost City. It is a strange and beautiful novel, set in a near future where a sixteen-year-old Dominican girl, not all that unlike Adana herself, searches for a golden eternal city believed to exist somewhere on a parallel Earth. Lost City earns a modest but enthusiastic readership, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she and her son, Maxwell, destroy the only copy of the manuscript.Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather's home when he discovers a mysterious package containing a manuscript titled A Model Earth, written by none other than Adana Moreau.Who was Adana Moreau How did Saul's grandfather, a Jewish immigrant born on a steamship to parents fleeing the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution, come across this unpublished, lost manuscript Where is Adana Moreau's mysterious son, Maxwell, a theoretical physicist, and why did Saul's grandfather send him the manuscript as his final act in life With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Maxwell in New Orleans, which is caught at that moment in the grip of Hurricane Katrina. Unable to reach Maxwell, Saul and Javier head south through the heartland of America toward that storm-ravaged city in search of answers.Blending the high-stakes mystery of The Shadow of the Wind, the science fiction echoes of Exit West, and the lyrical signatures of Bolao and Mrquez, Michael Zapata's debut shines a breathtaking new light on the experiences of displacement and exile that define our nation. The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is a brilliantly layered masterpiece that announces the arrival of a bold new literary talent.
The Other Americans
By Lalami, Laila
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efrain, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, a former classmate of Nora's and a veteran of the Iraq war; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.
Where We Come From
By Casares, Oscar
From the acclaimed author of Brownsville and Amigoland--a stunning and timely new novel about a Mexican American family in Brownsville, Texas, who reluctantly becomes involved in smuggling immigrants into the United StatesFrom a distance, the towns along the U.S.-Mexican border have dangerous reputations: on one side, drug cartels; on the other, zealous border patrol agents--and Brownsville is no different. But to twelve-year-old Orly, it's simply where his godmother, Nina, lives--and where he is being forced to stay the summer after his mother's sudden death.For Nina, Brownsville is where she grew up, where she lost her first and only love, and where she stayed as her relatives moved away and her neighborhood deteriorated. It's the place where she's buried all her secrets--and now she has another: she's providing refuge for a young immigrant boy named Daniel, for whom traveling to America has meant trading one set of dangers for another.Separated from the violent human traffickers who brought him across the border, pursued by the authorities, Daniel must stay completely hidden under Nina's roof. But when Orly discovers Daniel's presence, the two boys' immediate kinship--and shared desire for independence--puts them all at risk of exposure.Tackling the crisis of U.S. immigration policy from a deeply human angle, Where We Come From explores through an intimate lens the ways that family history shapes us, how secrets can burden us, and how finding compassion and understanding for others can ultimately set us free.
It Would Be Night in Caracas
By Borgo, Karina Sainz
Told with gripping intensity, It Would be Night in Caracas chronicles one woman's desperate battle to survive amid the dangerous, sometimes deadly, turbulence of modern Venezuela and the lengths she must go to secure her future.In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcn stands over an open grave. Alone, she buries her mother - the only family she has ever known - and worries that when night falls thieves will rob the grave. Even the dead cannot find peace here.Adelaida had a stable childhood in a prosperous Venezuela that accepted immigrants in search of a better life, where she lived with her single-mother in a humble apartment. But now Every day she lines up for bread that will inevitably be sold out by the time she reaches the registers. Every night she tapes her windows to shut out the tear gas raining down on protesters. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida must make a series of gruesome choices in order to survive in a country disintegrating into anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But just how far is she willing to goA bold new voice from Latin America, Karina Sainz Borgo's touching, thrilling debut is an ode to the Venezuelan people and a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.
Fracture
By Neuman, Andrés
Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrs Neuman's Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan's 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, a former electronics company executive and a survivor of the atomic bomb, has always lived like a fugitive from his own memories. He's spent decades traveling the world, making a life in different languages, only to find himself home again, living in Tokyo in his old age. On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Watanabe, like millions of others, is stunned by powerful tremors. A massive earthquake has struck to the north, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster -- and a stirring of the collective past. As the catastrophe unfolds, Watanabe's mind, too, undergoes a tectonic shift.
Comemadre
By Larraquy, Roque
In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.
The House of Impossible Beauties
By Cassara, Joseph
NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY Buzzfeed * The Wall Street Journal * The Millions * Southern Living * Bustle * Esquire * Entertainment Weekly * Nylon* Mashable * Libary Journal * Thrillist"Cassarass propulsive and profound first novel, finding ones home in the world - particularly in a subculture plagued by fear and intolerance from society - comes with tragedy as well as extraordinary personal freedom." -- EsquireA gritty and gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and 90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is BurningIts 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the citys glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ball scene, where seventeen-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning inside of her to help create family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone.As mother of the house, Angel recruits Venus, a whip-fast trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito, a quiet boy who loves fabrics and design; and Daniel, a butch queen who accidentally saves Venuss life. The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work, addiction, and persistent abuse, leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them. All are ambitious, resilient, and determined to control their own fates, even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.
Blue Flowers
By Saavedra, Carola
A novel of dark obsession, missed connections, and violent love.Marcos has just been through a divorce and moved into a new apartment. He feels alienated from his ex-wife, from his daughter, from society; everything feels flat and fake to him. He begins to receive letters at his new address from an anonymous troubled woman who signs off as A. and who clearly believes she is writing to the former tenant, her ex-lover, in the aftermath of a violent heartbreak. Marcos falls under the spell of the manic, hypnotic missives and for the first time in years, something moves him.Blue Flowers alternates between the letters detailing the dissolution of A.'s relationship, and Marcos' growing fixation with this damaged person. The letters become a kind of exorcism as both A.
Big Familia
By Moniz, Tomas
Big Familia follows Juan Gutirrez, a self-employed single father, as he navigates a tumultuous year of inescapable change. His daughter, Stella, is on the verge of moving away to college; his lover, Jared, is pressing him for commitment; and his favorite watering hole - a ramshackle dive presided over by Bob the Bartender - is transforming into a karaoke hotspot. The story is set in a neighborhood that is also changing, gentrification inciting the ire of the established community. Upon the unexpected death of one of the bar's regulars, Juan is sent reeling, and a series of upheavals follow as he both seeks and spurns intimacy, pondering the legacy of distant parents and a failed marriage and grappling with his sexuality - all the while cycling and dating, drinking at Nicks Lounge, and parenting a determined and defiant child-become-woman.
Optic Nerve
By Gainza, Maria
"Optic Nerve is one of the best books I've read in years. How did Mara Gainza pull off something so risky when it never reads as anything less than delightful and engrossing This is a book that loosens the restraints on literature and gives us a new way of seeing." -- Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo's bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy.
The Black Cathedral
By Gala, Marcial
Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fateThe Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral.
How to Order the Universe
By Ferrada, Maria Jose
A richly imaginative debut, detailing a girl and her father finding their way -- and themselves -- while they work as traveling hardware salesmen in Pinochet-era Chile, is a rare work of magic and originality.For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D's life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father's trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies amid the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As she becomes part of a tight-knit community of fellow salesmen and grifters, M is regaled with parables and anecdotes that inform her "parallel education," D's excuse for letting her skip school without M's mother's knowledge. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M's memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts.
Sea Monsters
By Aridjis, Chloe
Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle-class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is "a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments" (Los Angeles Review of Books) .. One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking -- recklessness, impulse, independence.. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisas surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will "promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery." It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the "Beach of the Dead.". Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.. "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebalds or Cusks, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." -- Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
The Mutations
By Comensal, Jorge
"Jorge Comensal's The Mutations oscillates masterfully between comedy and tragedy, gathering up in its pages a stupendous panoply of characters before whom the reader is never sure whether to smile in sympathy or pity." -- Fernando Aramburu, author of HomelandRamn Martinez is a militant atheist, successful lawyer, and conventional family man. But all of that changes when cancer of the tongue deprives him of the source of his power and livelihood: speech.The Mutations, by Jorge Comensal, is a comedy tracing the metastasis of Ramn's cancer through his body and in the lives of his family members, colleagues, and doctors, dissecting the experience of illness and mapping the relationships both strengthened and frayed by its wake. Mateo and Paulina, his teenage children, struggle with the temptations of masturbation and binge eating, respectively. Ramn's melancholic oncologist is haunted by the memory of a young patient whom he was unable to save. His selfish pathologist believes Ramn's tumor holds the key to a major scientific breakthrough. And then there's Elodia, Ramn's pious maid, who brings him a foulmouthed parrot as a birthday gift. This lewd bird becomes Ramn's companion, confidant, and unlikely double.Paying homage to the works of forebears such as Sontag, Didion, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, and filled with a rough-hewn poetry of regret, rage, and finally resignation, The Mutations offers a profound but funny cross section of modern Mexican life, as well as a bold treatment of an unspeakable yet universal reality
The Affairs of the Falcóns
By Rivero, Melissa
Winner of the 2019 New American Voices AwardLonglisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut NovelLonglisted for the Aspen Words Literary PrizeA Recommended Book of 2019 from:Southern Living * Buzzfeed * The Huffington Post * Bustle * Fierce * Hip Latina * Ms. Magazine * Alma * Library Journal * The Rumpus * The Millions * Refinery29 * Electric LiteratureA stunning debut novel about a young undocumented Peruvian woman fighting to keep her family afloat in New York City. Ana Falcón, along with her husband Lucho and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the familys opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama, and is stretched thin by unceasing shifts at her factory job. To make matters worse, Ana must also battle both criticism from Luchos cousin - who has made it obvious the family is not welcome to stay in her spare room for much longer - and escalating and unwanted attention from Mamas husband. As the pressure builds, Ana becomes increasingly desperate. While Lucho dreams of returning to Peru, Ana is deeply haunted by the demons she left behind and determined to persevere in this new country. But how many sacrifices is she willing to make before admitting defeat and returning to Peru? And what lines is she willing to cross in order to protect her family? The Affairs of the Falcónsis a beautiful, deeply urgent novel about the lengths one woman is willing to go to build a new life, and a vivid rendering of the American immigrant experience.
Stubborn Archivist
By Fowler, Yara Rodrigues
"I read Stubborn Archivist in a ravenous gulp. It's stunning: so articulate about what it means to live between two languages and countries, tenderly unraveling the knots of unbelonging." - Olivia Laing, author of TheLonely City and Crudo For fans of Chemistry and Normal People: A mesmerizing and witty debut novel about a young woman growing up between two disparate cultures, and the singular identity she finds along the wayBut where are you really from? When your mother considers another country home, it's hard to know where you belong. When the people you live among can't pronounce your name, it's hard to know exactly who you are. And when your body no longer feels like your own, it's hard to understand your place in the world. In Stubborn Archivist, a young British Brazilian woman from South London navigates growing up between two cultures and into a fuller understanding of her body, relying on signposts such as history, family conversation, and the eyes of the women who have shaped her - her mother, grandmother, and aunt.
Empty Set
By Bicecci, Verónica Gerber
"Vernica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt." - Francisco Goldman"From the very beginning, Vernica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up at a loss for words. She alone could achieve this feat: because she's a visual artist who takes everything she reads in as concentric circles threaded with color, and because she writes essays on painters who write across canvasses and writers who paint plots from the realities of life. . . . She alone could bring the necessary silence to a novel so perfect it ended up leaving me speechless as well." - Jorge F. HernndezHow do you draw an affair A family Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave Can we fall in love according to the hop skip of an acrostic Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator's attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.
The House of Broken Angels
By Urrea, Luis Alberto
The quintessential story of what it means to be the first generation to live two lives across one border, The House of Broken Angels is Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea's unforgettable portrait of the De La Cruz family as they celebrate the lives of two of their most beloved members over the course of one raucous and bittersweet weekend.NATIONAL BESTSELLER "All we do, mija, is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death."In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies, transforming the weekend into a farewell doubleheader. Among the guests is Big Angel's half brother, known as Little Angel, who must reckon with the truth that although he shares a father with his siblings, he has not, as a half gringo, shared a life.Across two bittersweet days in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many inspiring tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought these citizens to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home.Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels is Luis Alberto Urrea at his best, and cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank. "Epic . . . Rambunctious . . . Highly entertaining." --New York Times Book Review"A raucous, moving, and necessary book . . . Intimate and touching . . . the stuff of legend." --San Francisco Chronicle"Brilliant . . . Exceptional . . . The House of Broken Angels hums with joy." --NPR"An immensely charming and moving tale." --Boston Globe"A book about celebration that it, itself, a celebration." --Washington Post
Mouthful of Birds
By Schweblin, Samanta
A powerful, eerily unsettling story collection from a major international literary star.Unearthly and unexpected, the stories in Mouthful of Birds burrow their way into your psyche and don't let go. Samanta Schweblin haunts and mesmerizes in this extraordinary, masterful collection. Schweblin's stories have the feel of a sleepless night, where every shadow and bump in the dark take on huge implications, leaving your pulse racing, and the line between the real and the strange blur.
Hippie
By Coelho, Paulo
If you want to learn about yourself, start by exploring the world around you. Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to relive the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of Paulo, a young, skinny Brazilian man with a goatee and long, flowing hair, who wants to become a writer and sets off on a journey in search of a deeper meaning for his life: first on the famous "Death Train" to Bolivia, then on to Peru, later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.Paulo's travels take him farther to the famous Dam Square in Amsterdam filled with young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense, meditating and playing music, while discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness, and the search for an inner truth. There he meets Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties who has been waiting to find the ideal companion to accompany her on the fabled hippie trail to Nepal. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on the journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a personal transformation, changing their priorities and values along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship: a life-defining love story that awakens them on every level and leads to choices and decisions that will set the course for their lives thereafter.
The Crossed-Out Notebook
By Giacobone, Nicolas
Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo’s diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he’s written the previous day.
Death Comes in through the Kitchen
By Dovalpage, Teresa
Don't let the authentic Cuban recipes fool you: This is no cozy mystery. Set in Havana during the Black Spring of 2003, a charming but poison-laced culinary mystery reveals the darker side of the modern Revolution.Matt, a San Diego journalist, arrives in Havana to marry his girlfriend, Yarmila, a 24-year-old Cuban woman whom he first met through her food blog. But Yarmi isn't there to meet him at the airport, and when he hitches a ride to her apartment, he finds her lying dead in the bathtub.With Yarmi's murder, lovelorn Matt is immediately embroiled in a Cuban adventure he didn't bargain for. The police and secret service have him down as their main suspect, and in an effort to clear his name, he must embark on his own investigation into what really happened. The more Matt learns about his erstwhile fiance, though, the more he realizes he had no idea who she was at all - but did anyone
The Neighborhood
By Llosa, Mario Vargas
A thrilling tale of desire and Peruvian corruption swirls around a scandalous expos that leads to murderFrom the Nobel Laureate comes a politically charged detective novel weaving through the underbelly of Peruvian privilege. In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori's presidency, two wealthy couples of Lima's high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail. One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposs. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru's unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest expos yet.Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, the novel swirls into the kind of restless realism that has become Mario Vargas Llosa's signature style. A twisting, unpredictable tale, The Neighborhood is at once a scathing indictment of Fujimori's regime and a crime thriller that evokes the vulgarity of freedom in a corrupt system.
Lawn Boy
By Evison, Jonathan
"Jonathan Evison's voice is pure magic. In Lawn Boy, at once a vibrant coming-of-age novel and a sharp social commentary on class, Evison offers a painfully honest portrait of one young man's struggle to overcome the hand he's been dealt in life and reach for his dreams. It's a journey you won't want to miss, with an ending you won't forget." --Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale For Mike Muoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work - and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew - he knows that he's got to be the one to shake things up if he's ever going to change his life. But how In this funny, angry, touching, and ultimately deeply inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man on a journey to discover himself, a search to find the secret to achieving the American dream of happiness and prosperity. That's the birthright for all Americans, isn't it If so, then what is Mike Muoz's problem Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it. And it's looking really good.Lawn Boy is an important, entertaining, and completely winning novel about social class distinctions, about overcoming cultural discrimination, and about standing up for oneself.
Nervous System
By Meruane, Lina
Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the "country of the present" but she is from the "country of the past," a place burdened in her memory by both personal and political tragedies. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writer's block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.As Ella's anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn.
Songs for the Flames
By Vásquez, Juan Gabriel
The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing - but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour-de-force piece, the search for a book leads a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it - and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan.Juan Gabriel Vsquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others.
The Five Wounds
By Quade, Kirstin Valdez
From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following a New Mexican family's extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.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. Their reunion sets her own life down a startling path.Vivid, tender, darkly 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, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving To Tve, keeper of the family's history.
The Taste of Sugar
By Vera, Marisel
Marisel Vera emerges as a major voice of contemporary fiction with a heart- wrenching novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War. It is 1898, and groups of starving Puerto Ricans, los hambrientos, roam the parched countryside and dusty towns begging for food. Under the yoke of Spanish oppression, the Caribbean island is forced to prepare to wage war with the United States. Up in the mountainous coffee region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their small farm from the creditors. When the Spanish-American War and the great San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899 bring devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured, along with thousands of other puertorriquenos, to the sugar plantations of Hawaii -- another US territory -- where they are confronted by the hollowness of America's promises of prosperity.
You Had Me at Hola
By Daria, Alexis
"Soapy, smart and so sexy... with vibrant characters and electric chemistry comparable to the telenovelas that inspired it, you'll be thrilled You Had Me At Hola doesn't come with commercials!"--Sarah MacLean, New York Times bestselling authorRITA Award Winning author Alexis Daria brings readers an unforgettable, hilarious rom-com set in the drama-filled world of telenovelas - perfect for fans of Jane the Virgin and The Kiss Quotient.Leading Ladies do not end up on tabloid covers. After a messy public breakup, soap opera darling Jasmine Lin Rodriguez finds her face splashed across the tabloids. When she returns to her hometown of New York City to film the starring role in a bilingual romantic comedy for the number one streaming service in the country, Jasmine figures her new "Leading Lady Plan" should be easy enough to follow - until a casting shake-up pairs her with telenovela hunk Ashton Surez.