Regular price: $27.93
A Place to Stand is Jimmy Santiago Baca's memoir of childhood on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under the harrowing conditions behind bars. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca describes the extreme measures he had to take to survive, which endowed him with an indomitable will to resist the dehumanization of prison life. The act of writing offered a powerful means of transcending his surroundings.
Murderers, mob bosses, and convicts . . . these guys are not your average neighbors. Unless you live on Alcatraz. It's 1935 and 12-year-old Moose Flanagan and his family have just moved to the infamous island that's home to criminals like notorious escapee Roy Gardner, Machine Gun Kelly, and of course, Al Capone. Now Moose has to try to fit in at his new school, avoid getting caught up in one of the warden's daughter's countless plots, and keep an eye on his sister Natalie, who's not like other kids.
The author of Across the Wire offers brilliant investigative reporting of what went wrong when, in May 2001, a group of 26 men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of Southern Arizona. Only 12 men came back out.
When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of "Brando Skyhorse", the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.
A Place to Stand is Jimmy Santiago Baca's memoir of childhood on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under the harrowing conditions behind bars. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca describes the extreme measures he had to take to survive, which endowed him with an indomitable will to resist the dehumanization of prison life. The act of writing offered a powerful means of transcending his surroundings.
Murderers, mob bosses, and convicts . . . these guys are not your average neighbors. Unless you live on Alcatraz. It's 1935 and 12-year-old Moose Flanagan and his family have just moved to the infamous island that's home to criminals like notorious escapee Roy Gardner, Machine Gun Kelly, and of course, Al Capone. Now Moose has to try to fit in at his new school, avoid getting caught up in one of the warden's daughter's countless plots, and keep an eye on his sister Natalie, who's not like other kids.
The author of Across the Wire offers brilliant investigative reporting of what went wrong when, in May 2001, a group of 26 men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of Southern Arizona. Only 12 men came back out.
When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of "Brando Skyhorse", the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin.
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong, not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. 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.
Nearly a half century into being a feminist and legal pioneer, something funny happened to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The octogenarian won the Internet. Across America, people who weren't even born when Ginsburg made her name are tattooing themselves with her face, setting her famously searing dissents to music, and making viral videos in tribute.
As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared, and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men.
In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country - a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets.
When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: He wrote. The result is this stunning memoir. Featuring 78 poems and 78 essays, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine - growing up dirt poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents. Throughout, a portrait emerges of his mother as a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated woman.
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize-winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.
Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined", Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.
Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited but never quite forgotten either....
Can literature change our real world society? At its foundation, utopian and dystopian fiction asks a few seemingly simple questions aimed at doing just that. Who are we as a society? Who do we want to be? Who are we afraid we might become? When these questions are framed in the speculative versions of Heaven and Hell on earth, you won't find easy answers, but you will find tremendously insightful and often entertaining perspectives.
In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power - they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.
Echo Park is like a river that cannot be stepped in the same way twice. As with so many corners of Los Angeles, the Mexicans in this part of town watch with dismay and denial as their own few blocks are steadily encroached upon by gentrification, racism, and the inevitable passage of time. Yet even as the world keeps turning, many of the residents are frozen in place, tied together by the common misfortune of poverty and the uncommon moment when a little girl rocking out to Madonna is killed in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting.
The facts may be invented, but the total portrait of a shifting city is alarmingly realistic. Giving voice to the varied vignettes are eight different narrators who are all possessed of the characters' similar sorrows, awes, and outrages. Their stories can stand alone, but are much more deeply poignant when taken together. We have Aurora, who the bullet barely missed, and her mother, a maid in a house that is already clean. We have the crazy Coat Queen, who think she's seen the Virgin Mary, and the mysterious Jesus, who thinks he is The Lord. We have the illegal day laborer, who is asked to cover up one murder, and the citizen bus driver, who is asked to reveal another murder.
Throughout this remarkably astute observation of urban decay, the cacophony of voices piles up into a clear and singular tone of struggle. They struggle for their very lives; they struggle to find forgiveness for crimes long since past; they struggle to find meaning in the ever-changing storefronts and ever-shifting boundaries of a city divided by race and wealth. Each narrator in turn steps up to deliver the sad reports, the astonishing connections, and the overdue diatribes. The end result is a debut novel that manages to uncover some glints of optimism in its unflinching portrayal of Mexican life in The City of Angels. Megan Volpert
"We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours."
With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream.
When a dozen or so girls and mothers gather on an Echo Park street corner to act out a scene from a Madonna music video, they find themselves caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. In the aftermath, Aurora Esperanza grows distant from her mother, Felicia, who as a housekeeper in the Hollywood Hills establishes a unique relationship with a detached housewife.
The Esperanzas’ shifting lives connect with those of various members of their neighborhood. A day laborer trolls the streets for work with men half his age and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; a religious hypocrite gets her comeuppance when she meets the Virgin Mary at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard; a typical bus route turns violent when cultures and egos collide in the night, with devastating results; and Aurora goes on a journey through her gentrified childhood neighborhood in a quest to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican Americans dream of, "the land that belongs to us again."
Like the Academy Award–winning film Crash, The Madonnas of Echo Park follows the intersections of its characters and cultures in Los Angeles. In the footsteps of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, Brando Skyhorse in his debut novel gives voice to one neighborhood in Los Angeles with an astonishing— and unforgettable—lyrical power.
This was one of my favorite works, and amazingly, it seems to be Skyhorse's first and only novel. Every character is completely developed, so much that you are drawn deeply into each of their lives, knowing all of their insecurities and struggles. At first, it is not obvious, but each of the characters intertwine with the others in some interesting relationship or bond but, in most cases, the reader is left to figure out the relationship, until well into each chapter. This fictional work speaks in a very real way to stereotypes, class struggles, prejudices, immigration issues, urban decay and urban renewal, all in a single, very interesting community. I loved it. I just keep waiting for the book to be a Pulitzer winner or a lesser honor, such as one of Oprah's Book Club Picks! This book was said to be related to the Pulitzer Prize winner "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which I also enjoyed, but it was nowhere near the interesting entanglement of characters developed in The Madonnas!
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
I read this book based on reviews and thought it was very interesting. It follows several characters and can get a bit confusing, but you are able to place the characters and the time based on the genre of music they listen to, which was very creative. A really enjoyable story with excellent narration. I highly recommend it.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and each narrator. I was afraid, at first, that all the characters, secondary characters, and narrators would get confusing but it never did.
The characters are rich and the backdrop is laid out so beautifully that you feel you are there. I was so enthralled with the book and characters that I had to constantly remind myself that I myself am not a chola in Echo Park but a white girl in the South. The narrators do a beautiful job!
The only 'complaint' I have is that I didn't (and yet strangely did) like how some character's lives were left so open-ended. I felt that some of the stories were left too open, but I do feel it is far better to be left wanting more or to be left curious than to over explain or provide too perfect of an ending. So I don't like, and yet do like, how some of the lives were left open ended.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful