Camino del sol

A family memoir told in the voices of ancestors, House of Houses is about oppression and survival and sometimes triumph, as "any book about a Mexican American family must be." Mora's House of Houses is large, imagined, traditional, a refuge from the desert's heat, where the generations of her family, living and dead, mingle through the months of a single year. The house in inhabited by Mora's father, Raul, the fighter who hit no one; her mother, Estela, the extrovert who in grade school chose to be a rainbow tulip for May Day since no one color was enough; Estela's mother, Amelia, the Mexican Cinderella, a red-haired orphan taken in by wealthy relatives. Drawing on the magical realism that distinguishes the work of so many Latin American writers - from Garcia Marquez to Esquivel - Mora writes of the multicolored cloth that heals the women in her family and of her father's ability to turn himself into a bird. Great-grandmother Tomasa, in her nineties, leaves fruit behind her radio for the announcer she loves. And Mora's Aunt Chole, though legally blind, is the only one who sees The Virgin Mary when she appears in the garden.

Contains fifty-three poems exploring the topics of romantic love, spiritual life, and morality.

Fleeing a failed marriage and haunted by ghosts of his past, Luis Alberto Urrea jumped into his car several years ago and headed west. Driving cross-country with a cat named Rest Stop, Urrea wandered the West from one Spring through the next. As nature opened Urrea's eyes, writing opened his heart. In journal entries that sparkle with discovery, Urrea ruminates on music, poetry, and the landscape. With wonder and spontaneity, he relates tales of marmots, geese, bears, and fellow travelers. He makes readers feel mountain air "so crisp you feel you could crunch it in your mouth" and reminds us all to experience the magic and healing of small gestures, ordinary people, and common creatures.

Bilingual collection of poems.

Set in Arizona in the mid-1950s and alive with the unique racial mix of the American Southwest, In Search of Snow tells the story of Mike McGurk, a sort of blue-collar Don Quixote, whose search for love forms the backbone of this American picaresque novel. Son of the redoubtable Texaco Turk McGurk - gas station operator, small-time boxer, and wandering misfit who lets loose foul-mouthed slurs about almost everyone and hews to an impossible, often hilarious, code of masculinity - Mike yearns for his mother, who died when he was seven, and for a sense of family and connection, which the emotionally bankrupt Turk, for all his bluster and redneck charm, cannot provide. In his search for love and a life in the Arizona desert, where opportunities for both are limited, Mike makes a new friend in Bobo Garcia, a Mexican-American prize-fighter-turned-mechanic who is also a World War II veteran, albeit one who saw more of that war's horrors than Mike. Bobo rescues Mike from the clutches of Ramses Castro and his Indian gang and accompanies him on a journey that leads from one unlikely adventure to the next. From the excitement of erotic love, which beckons in the person of Mike's college-bound cousin Lily, to the comfort and responsibility of familial love amid the sprawling Garcia clan, Mike struggles with the sometimes comic dilemma of manhood. Although he begins as the victim of circumstance, Mike finally takes charge of his own destiny through a cathartic act of destruction that lights up his beloved Arizona desert. With a remarkable variety of idiosyncratic characters who are imagined in detail so telling that even their bedroom slippers speak volumes and with natural scenes so intimately rendered that you can hear the delicate sound of sand granules rustling along the tarmac in a light desert wind, In Search of Snow introduces an exciting new writer whose gift for fiction is as dazzling as his prose.

In Breathing Between the Lines, the writer returns to poetry, her first love. From childhood, writing poems has been both a refuge and a release through the power of her own imagination. In 1988, however, Martinez's poetry was used against her in a federal indictment for smuggling Salvadoran refugees into the United States. The incriminating poem carried this punch line: "In my country, we sing of a baby in a manger, finance death squads." Seven long months later, she was acquitted. After the trial - "a poet's nightmare, in which words, so full of liberating possibilities, were twisted and used against me" - Martinez's poetry dried up. Years passed before "the miracle" of writing finally brought her reconciliation and a return to sanity from the searing experience. Once again, poetry now drives her life, fills her days, and gives meaning to a world gone crazy.

After breaking a curse that has troubled the kingdom for years, Shielder's Mark is rewarded with the hand of a princess only to find married life to be as difficult as any magical foe he's ever faced.

""The stereotype spells death to the imagination by shrinking all possibilities to one. Generalizations encourage us to stop considering what can be." -from the Introduction The sheer number of different ethnic groups and cultures in the United States makes it tempting to classify them according to broad stereotypes, ignoring their unique and changing identities. Because of their growing diversity within the United States, Latinas and Latinos face this problem in their everyday lives. With cultural roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or a variety of other locales, Hispanic-origin people in the United States are too often consigned to a single category. With this book Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López set out to change this. The other Latino is a diverse collection of essays written by some of the best emerging and established contemporary writers of Latin origin to help answer the question: How can we treat U.S. Latina and Latino literature as a definable whole while acknowledging the many shifting identities within their cultures? By telling their own stories, these authors illuminate the richness of their cultural backgrounds while adding a unique perspective to Latina and Latino literature. This book sheds light on the dangers of abandoning identity by accepting cultural stereotypes and ignoring diversity within diversity. These contributors caution against judging literature based on the race of the author and lament the use of the term Hispanic to erase individuality. Honestly addressing difficult issues, this book will greatly contribute to a better understanding of Latina and Latino literature and identity"--