Literanista
June 30, 2009
Coming to a bookstore near you:
I first discussed Raul Ramos Y Sanchez back in 2007. He is host of http://www.myimmigrationstory.com/ – an online forum for the U.S. immigrant community and raulramos.com.
His originally self-published book, America Libre debuts in bookstores nationwide in July.
About the book:
After years of anti-immigrant backlash, anger seethes in the nation’s Latino communities. The crowded streets bristle with restless youth, idled by a deep recession. When undercover detectives in San Antonio accidentally kill a young Latina bystander during a botched drug bust, riots erupt across the Southwest. As the inner-city violence escalates, Anglo vigilantes strike back with shooting rampages.
Exploiting the turmoil, a congressional demagogue succeeds in passing legislation that transforms the nation’s Hispanic enclaves into walled-off Quarantine Zones. Citizens tagged Class H-those who are Hispanic, are married to a Hispanic, or have at least one grandparent of Hispanic origin-are forced into detention centers.
Amid the chaos in his L.A. barrio, Manolo Suarez is out of work and struggling to support his growing family. But under the spell of a beautiful Latina radical, the former U.S. Army Ranger and decorated war veteran now finds himself questioning his loyalty to his wife-and to his country.
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Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich
Having miraculously survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor, Rich spontaneously accepted a free-lance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language. Before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. In this inspirational memoir, Rich documents her experiences in India ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. Seamlessly combining Rich s courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with wideranging reporting, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
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Side Dishes: Latina American Women, Sex, and Cultural Production (New Directions in International Studies) by Melissa A. Fitch
Moving beyond the “main dishes” of traditional literary works, Side Dishes offers a provocative and delicious new understanding of Latin American women’s authorship and activism. The book illuminates a wealth of creative and intellectual work by Latin American women editors to comedians and explores them in light of their treatment of women’s sexuality. Side Dishes considers feminist pornography and literary representations of masturbation, bisexuality, lesbianism, and sexual fantasies and the treatment of women’s sexuality in comedy, science fiction, feminist journals, academia, and four contemporary films.
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Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo
Juan Goytisolo has radically revised his masterpiece Juan the Landless for this new translation by renowned translator Peter Bush. Marking a turning point in Goytisolo’s work from outright hostility for his homeland towards a growing appreciation and celebration of the many Muslim contributions to western culture, Juan the Landless is a desperate, sympathetic, erotic, and anarchic attempt by the greatest living novelist from Spain to reconcile himself to seeing the world as a man without a home, without a country.
