Featured Books
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Celebrating Hispanic Authors!
(Librarian Selected)
Loverboys: Stories
by Ana Castillo
Love and lust among Latinos--men, women, straight, gay and lesbian. The exception is Vatolandia, in which the heroine decides she would rather be lonely than go out with worthless men.
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Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain
by Andrea Bell & Yolanda Molina-Gavilan
Opening a window onto a new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers science fiction stories from over ten Latin American countries and Spain, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the early 21st century. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region's celebrated literary fantastic. In the 27 stories included here, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events.
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The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans: A Feast of Short Fiction
by Carmen Tafolla
As a helping of "down-home magical realism," this collection of 16 short stories explores the human spirit inherent in the bilingual, bicultural world of the Texas-Mexico border. With a fresh sense of humor and human understanding, these stories skillfully bridge the gap between miracles and tragedies, prejudice and transcendence, and oppression and liberation. From the comical exploration of the hypocrisy expressed at funerals to the spiritual mission of a magical tortilla, the collection draws upon a wide range of emotions but comes together in a singular, powerful voice that reflects the holiness found in everyday life.
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140 Twitter Poems
by Christopher Carmona & Gerald Padilla
A collection of 140 poems each over 140 days by Christopher Carmona. Each poem represents a daily reflection that embodies the social and political fervor of the day.
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Out in the Open
by Jesus Carrasco
A young boy has fled his home. He's pursued by dangerous forces. What lies before him is an infinite, arid plain, one he must cross in order to escape those from whom he's fleeing. One night on the road, he meets an old goatherd, a man who lives simply but righteously, and from that moment on, their paths intertwine. Out in the Open tells the story of this journey through a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A world where names and dates don't matter, where morals have drained away with the water. In this landscape the boy--not yet a lost cause--has the chance to choose hope and bravery, or to live forever mired in the cycle of violence in which he was raised. Carrasco has masterfully created a high stakes world, a dystopian tale of life and death, right and wrong, terror and salvation.
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A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
The story of Jimmy Santiago Baca, "winner of the Pushcart Prize and the American Book Award ... called an heir to Pablo Neruda ... [who] at the age of twenty-one ... was illiterate and facing five to ten years in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs.
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This is How You Lose Her
by
This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy. On a beach in Santo Domingo, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of live is forever."
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The House of Broken Angels
by Luis Alberto Urrea
In Urrea's exuberant new novel of Mexican-American life, 70-year-old patriarch Big Angel de la Cruz is dying, and he wants to have one last birthday blowout. Unfortunately, his 100-year-old mother, America, dies the week of his party, so funeral and birthday are celebrated one day apart. The entire contentious, riotous de la Cruz clan descends on San Diego for the events-bHigh rollers and college students, prison veternaos and welfare mothers, happy kids and sad old-timers and pinches gringos and all available relatives.c Not to mention figurative ghosts of the departed and an unexpected guest with a gun. Taking place over the course of two days, with time out for an extended flashback to Big Angel's journey from La Paz to San Diego in the 1960s, the narrative follows Big Angel and his extended familia as they air old grievances, initiate new romances, and try to put their relationships in perspective. Of the large cast, standouts include Perla, Big Angel's wife, the object of his undimmed affection; Little Angel, his half-Anglo half-brother, who strains to remain aloof; and Lalo, his son, trailing a lifetime of bad decisions. Urrea (The Hummingbird's Daughter) has written a vital, vibrant book about the immigrant experience that is a messy celebration of life's common joys and sorrows
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by Rudolfo A. Anaya
The legend of Quetzalcoatl is the enduring epic myth of Mesoamerica. The gods create the universe, but man must carefully tend to the harmony of the world. Without spiritual attention to harmony, chaos may reign, destroying the universe and civilization.
The ancient Mexicans, like other peoples throughout the world, wrestled with ideas and metaphors by which to know the Godhead and developed their own concepts about their relationship to the universe. Quetzalcoatl came to the Toltecs to teach them art, agriculture, peace, and knowledge. He was a redeemer god, and his story inspires, instructs, and entertains, as do all the great myths of the world.
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