Download or read book Chango s Fire written by Ernesto Quinonez and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young man seeks a better life in Spanish Harlem—even as he helps burn it down—in this “searing portrait of a community at the tipping point” (Booklist). In New York City’s Spanish Harlem, Julio and Maritza are each searching for a path that will give their lives meaning, no matter how shadowed by controversy. Julio is an arsonist for hire, pocketing thousands of dollars from investors eager to capitalize on more expensive real estate. But when he has reason to stop setting his neighborhood ablaze and vows to change his ways, Julio’s employers threaten his life—and the lives of those close to him. Maritza, meanwhile, has become the pastor of a progressive Pentecostal church—the perfect cover for the scam she’s running. For the right price, she’ll make anyone an American citizen. With a cast of characters as colorful as the city itself, Ernesto Quiñonez brings a vibrant community and landscape to life in this follow-up to his acclaimed novel Bodega Dreams
Download or read book Bodega Dreams written by Ernesto Quiñonez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "thriller with literary merit" (Time Out New York), a stunning narrative combines the gritty rhythms of Junot Diaz with the noir genius of Walter Mosley. Bodega Dreams pulls us into Spanish Harlem, where the word is out: Willie Bodega is king. Need college tuition for your daughter? Start-up funds for your fruit stand? Bodega can help. He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty—and a steady income from the drugs he pushes. Lyrical, inspired, and darkly funny, this powerful debut novel brilliantly evokes the trial of Chino, a smart, promising young man to whom Bodega turns for a favor. Chino is drawn to Bodega's street-smart idealism, but soon finds himself over his head, navigating an underworld of switchblade tempers, turncoat morality, and murder. "Bodega is a fascinating character. . . . The story [Quiñonez] tells has energy and verve." —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Ta na written by Ernesto Quiñonez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A uniquely dark, coming-of-age novel rife with urban magical realism, love, and redemption, from the author of Bodega Dreams When Julio, a teenager living in Spanish Harlem, hears that Taina, a pregnant fifteen-year-old from his high school claims to be a virgin, he decides to believe her. Julio has a history of strange visions and his blind and unrequited love for Taina will unleash a whirlpool of emotions that will bring him to question his hard-working Puerto Rican mother and his communist Ecuadorian father, his beliefs and even the building blocks of modern science (after seeing the conception of Taina’s baby as a revolution in nature). After meeting Taína's uncle, "El Vejigante", an ex-con with a dark past, he accepts his proposal to support her during her pregnancy and becomes entangled in a web of crime that, while taking him closer to Taína, ultimately reveals a family secret that will not leave him unscathed.
Download or read book Hospitality in American Literature and Culture written by Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating it at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the US, it visits recent representations of immigrant spatiality, from the space of the body in film to the ways in which immigrants are incorporated into the US in a range of literary examples. Timely and imperative in light of the legacies of colonialism, and the realities of modern-day globalization, this book will be of value to fields including post-colonialism, American Studies, and others.
Download or read book Roscoe written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter” (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past—to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.
Download or read book Shango written by Baba Raul Canizares and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shango came over to America in the hearts of his devotees. They did not choose to make the middle passage, but many of them survived it because they had Shango's example of one who could beat any odds and make any situation advantageous; Shango exemplifies the Philosophy of "When Life Throws Lemons at You, Make Lemonade." His capacity to adapt, to break with old modes, to be individualistic and iconoclastic, makes shango a perfect divinity for the new world, for all of these are traits that have helped us survive and thrive. It is in this spirit that I brazenly claim shango as our beloved paradigm. The most popular orisha in America.
Download or read book The Latinx Urban Condition written by Crescencio Lopez-Gonzalez and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Latinx Urban Condition brings interdisciplinary cultural theory and U.S. Latinx urban literature into conversation, focusing on the realities and urban experiences of Latinx living in major cities in the United States from the 1960’s to the present. As a cultural studies analyst of U.S. Latinx urban literature and culture, the book focuses on analyzing the works of Latinx authors who write about the cities in which they were raised and how growing up in these environments shaped their lives, their communities, and their future. Their fictional work helps us understand how the human and cultural tapestry of the Latinx community is inextricably connected to the spatial transformations taking place in many cities across the country, most notably within the cities in which the narratives take place. The main purpose is to analyze the symbolic realities lived by the characters in order to understand how Latino families and communities are experiencing displacement under instituted neoliberal policies, a process known as development and progress or gentrification. These processes are experienced through aspects of privatization, deregulation, homelessness, residential segregation, inequality, unemployment, and poverty.
Download or read book Living Up The Street written by Gary Soto and published by Laurel Leaf. This book was released on 1992-02-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a prose that is so beautiful it is poetry, we see the world of growing up and going somewhere through the dust and heat of Fresno's industrial side and beyond: It is a boy's coming of age in the barrio, parochial school, attending church, public summer school, and trying to fall out of love so he can join in a Little League baseball team. His is a clarity that rings constantly through the warmth and wry reality of these sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, always human remembrances.
Download or read book Profane Sacred written by Bridget A. Kevane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profane & Sacred examines religious discourse in contemporary Latino/a fiction, exploring how religion creates, mediates or changes Latino culture and identity. Much contemporary literary criticism on Latino/a literature has focused on the bilingual and bicultural nature of Latino identity, history and cultural production. But just as the multiplicity of cultures and languages has shaped Latino identity and history, so too has religion. Studying the religious discourse found in fiction can clearly enrich not only our perception of the diversity within the Hispanic communities, but also the diversity between sociologists and creative writers.
Download or read book Loosing My Espanish written by H.G. Carrillo and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar Delossantos is about to lose his job as a teacher at a Jesuit high school in Chicago. Rather than go quietly, he embarks on a valiant last history lesson that chronicles the flight from Cuba of his makeshift extended family.Evoking the struggle between nostalgia and the realities of the Cuban Revolution with both grit and lyricism, he inspires his students with an altogether dazzling reinterpretation of the Cuban-American experience. By turns heartbreaking, funny, and brilliantly inventive, Loosing My Espanish is a singular debut. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Quinn s Book written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the moment he rescues the beautiful, passionate Maud Fallon from the icy waters of the Hudson one wintry day in 1849, Daniel Quinn is thrust into a bewildering, adventure-filled journey through the tumult of nineteenth-century America. As he quests after the beguiling and elusive Maud, Daniel will witness the rise and fall of great dynasties in upstate New York, epochal prize fights, exotic life in the theatre, visitations from spirits beyond the grave, horrific battles between Irish immigrants and the "Know-Nothings," vicious New York draft riots, heroic passages through the Underground Railroad, and the bloody despair of the Civil War. Filled with Dickensian characters, a vivid sense of history, and a marvellously inventive humor, Quinn's Bookis an engaging delight by an acclaimed modern master.
Download or read book Chang Decolonizing the African Diaspora written by Manuel Zapata Olivella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crowning achievement of Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella, Changó, Decolonizing the African Diaspora depicts the African American experience from a perspective of gods who stand over the world and watch. The centennial anniversary release of this ground-breaking postcolonial text remains a passionate tour de force to make sense of our past, present, and future. A new introduction by Professor William Luis positions the book in contemporary politics and reasserts this book’s importance in Afro-Spanish American literature. Ranging from Brazil to New England but centered in the Caribbean, where countless enslaved people once arrived from West Africa, this book recounts scenes from four centuries of involuntary displacement and servitude of the muntu, the people. Through the voices of Benkos Biojo in Colombia, Henri Christophe in Haiti, Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, Jose Maria Morelos in Mexico, the Aleijadinho in Brazil, or Malcolm X in Harlem, Zapata Olivella conveys, in luminous verse and prose, the breadth of heroism, betrayal, and suffering common to the history of people of African descent in the Western hemisphere. Readers and critics of postcolonial literatures will relish the opportunity to experience Zapata Olivella's masterpiece in English; students of world cultures will appreciate this extraordinary tapestry, woven from equal strands of myth and history.
Download or read book Jalapeno Bagels written by Natasha Wing and published by . This book was released on 1996-06 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For International Day at school, Pablo wants to bring something that reflects the cultures of both his parents.
Download or read book Presto Change O written by Edouard Manceau and published by Twirl. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here you'll find a magic book Where all's not what it seems. For when you turn each object round PRESTO CHANGE-O The unexpected will be seen. See the raccoon hiding in a magic cauldron? The owl pretending to be a clock? The lion masquerading as a flower? A rabbit hiding in a hot-air balloon? Kids will love working magic with just a few simple turns—and a few rhyming verses—that transform everyday objects into familiar creatures. Simple manipulations for little hands make this a literal page turner.
Download or read book Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces written by Maceo Montoya and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as one of the San Francisco Chronicles' 15 best books of 2021 From critically acclaimed author Maceo Montoya comes an inventive and adventurous satirical novel about a Mexican-American artist’s efforts to fulfill his vision: to paint masterful works of art. His plans include a move to Paris to join the ranks of his artistic hero, Gustave Courbet—except it’s 1943, and he’s stuck in the backwoods of New Mexico. Penniless and prone to epileptic fits, even his mother thinks he’s crazy. Ernie Lobato has just inherited his deceased uncle’s manuscript and drawings. At the urging of his colleague, an activist and history buff (Lorraine Rios), Ernie sends the materials to a professor of Chicanx literature (Dr. Samuel Pizarro). Throughout the novel, Dr. Pizarro shares his insights and comments on the uncle’s legacy in a series of annotations to his text and illustrations. As Ernie’s uncle battles a world that is unkind to “starving artists,” he runs into other tormented twentieth-century artists, writers, and activists with ambitions to match his own: a young itinerant preacher (Reies López Tijerina); the “greatest insane artist” (Martín Ramirez); and Oscar Zeta Acosta who is hellbent on self-destruction. Will the fortuitous encounters with these prophetic figures result in his own genius being recognized? Or will his uncompromising nature consign him to what he fears most? Told through a combination of words and images in the tradition of classic works such as Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland, Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces features fifty-one vivid black-and-white pen drawings. This complex and engaging story also doubles as literary criticism, commenting on how outsiders’ stories fit into the larger context of the Chicanx literary canon. A unique and multilayered story that embraces both contradiction and possibility, it also sheds new light on the current state of Chicanx literature while, at the same time, contributing to it. Propulsive, humorous, and full of life, this candid novel will be loved not only by Beat fiction fans but by contemporary fiction lovers as well.
Download or read book The Gentrification Plot written by Thomas Heise and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, crime novelists have set their stories in New York City, a place long famed for decay, danger, and intrigue. What happens when the mean streets of the city are no longer quite so mean? In the wake of an unprecedented drop in crime in the 1990s and the real-estate development boom in the early 2000s, a new suspect is on the scene: gentrification. Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging “gentrification plot” in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant—that have been central to African American, Latinx, immigrant, and blue-collar life in the city. Heise reads works by Richard Price, Henry Chang, Gabriel Cohen, Reggie Nadelson, Ivy Pochoda, Grace Edwards, Ernesto Quiñonez, Wil Medearis, and Brian Platzer, tracking their representations of “broken-windows” policing, cultural erasure, racial conflict, class grievance, and displacement. Placing their novels in conversation with oral histories, urban planning, and policing theory, he explores crime fiction’s contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial city’s dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book, The Gentrification Plot reveals how today’s crime writers narrate the death—or murder—of a place and a way of life.
Download or read book The Flaming Corsage written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a Manhattan hotel room, the "Love Nest Killings of 1908" take place. But the mystery of who killed whom, and why, does not unravel until we explore the lives of Katrina Taylor and Edward Daughtery. He is a first-generation Irish American and a successful playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether. Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, The Flaming Corsagefollows Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs-their socially opposed families; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the physician Giles Fitzroy, and his wife; and Edward's friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn. The Flaming Corsageevocatively portrays through the lens of Albany's robust Irishtown and English-Dutch aristocracy the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts and furies that know no bounds of time or place.
