September 15th through October 15th is National Hispanic Heritage Month—a celebration that recognizes the contributions and influence of Hispanic Americans on the history, culture, and achievements of the United States.
To help celebrate, we’ve put together a list of books that pay tribute to the generations of Hispanic Americans who have influenced and enriched our nation and society.
Nonfiction:
Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Identity by Paola Ramos
A vital and inspiring work of reportage, Finding Latinx calls on all of us to expand our understanding of what it means to be Latino and what it means to be American. The first step towards change, writes Ramos, is for us to recognize who we are.
Young Latinos across the United States are redefining their identities, pushing boundaries, and awakening politically in powerful and surprising ways. Many of them—Afrolatino, indigenous, Muslim, queer and undocumented, living in large cities and small towns—are voices who have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represented. No longer.
In this empowering cross-country travelogue, journalist and activist Paola Ramos embarks on a journey to find the communities of people defining the controversial term, “Latinx.” She introduces us to the indigenous Oaxacans who rebuilt the main street in a post-industrial town in upstate New York, the “Las Poderosas” who fight for reproductive rights in Texas, the musicians in Milwaukee whose beats reassure others of their belonging, as well as drag queens, environmental activists, farmworkers, and the migrants detained at our border. Drawing on intensive field research as well as her own personal story, Ramos chronicles how “Latinx” has given rise to a sense of collectivity and solidarity among Latinos unseen in this country for decades.
Coming in October!
Soon to Be Available in Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Also Available in a Spanish-Language Edition: En busca de las voces que redefinen la identidad Latina.
Click to Request an eGalley on Edelweiss.
Click to Request an eGalley on NetGalley.
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú
Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River goes behind the headlines, making urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line.
For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there.
Plagued by nightmares, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the whole story.
Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Also Available in a Spanish-Language Edition: La línea se convierte en río.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys, and Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer by Luis J. Rodriguez
“Powerful from start to finish, Rodriguez’s book celebrates Xicanx culture and wisdom while calling for much-needed global healing. A thoughtful and radically provocative collection.”—Kirkus Reviews
Luis J. Rodriguez writes about race, culture, identity, and belonging and what these all mean and should mean (but often fail to) in the volatile climate of our nation. His passion and wisdom inspire us with the message that we must come together if we are to move forward. As he writes in the preface, “Like millions of Americans, I’m demanding a new vision, a qualitatively different direction, for this country. One for the shared well-being of everyone. One with beauty, healing, poetry, imagination, and truth.” The pieces in From Our Land to Our Land capture that same fantastic energy and wisdom and will spark conversation and inspiration.
Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.
A House of My Own: Stories of My Life by Sandra Cisneros
Poignant, honest, and deeply moving, A House of My Own is an exuberant celebration of a life lived to the fullest, from one of our most beloved writers.
From Chicago to Mexico, the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, a place where she could truly take root, has eluded her. In this jigsaw autobiography, made up of essays and images spanning three decades-and including never-before-published work-Cisneros has come home at last.
Written with her trademark lyricism, in these signature pieces the acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2018 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature shares her transformative memories and reveals her artistic and intellectual influences.
Available in Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Also Available in a Spanish-Language Edition: Una casa propia.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
Fiction:
It is Wood, It is Stone by Gabriella Burnham
An exquisite debut novel by young Brazilian American author Gabriella Burnham, It Is Wood, It Is Stone is about women whose romantic and subversive entanglements reflect on class and colorism, sexuality, and complex, divisive histories.
Linda, an anxious and restless American, has moved to São Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong professorship. As Dennis submerges himself in his work, Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda’s unwavering and skilled maid, Marta, has more claim to Linda’s home than Linda can fathom. Marta, who is struggling to make sense of complicated history and its racial tensions, is exasperated by Linda’s instability. One day, Linda leaves home with a charismatic and beguiling artist, whom she joins on a fervent adventure that causes reverberations felt by everyone, and ultimately binds Marta and Linda in a profoundly human, and tender, way.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
Click to View the Book Club Kit.
Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis
A groundbreaking, genre-defining work, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit.
In defiance of the brutal military government that took power in Uruguay in the 1970s, and under which homosexuality is a dangerous transgression, five women miraculously find one another—and, together, an isolated cape that they claim as their own. Over the next thirty-five years, they travel back and forth from this secret sanctuary, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow
or alone. Throughout it all, they will be tested repeatedly—by their families, lovers, society, and one another—as they fight to live authentic lives.
Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Also Available in a Spanish-Language Edition: Cantoras.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
Click to Watch Carolina De Robertis Speak to Librarians.
Where We Come From by Oscar Cásares
Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Also Available in a Spanish-Language Edition: De donde venimos.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.
Available in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Also Available in a Spanish-Language Edition: Desierto sonoro.
Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
Click to Watch Valeria Luiselli Speak to Librarians.
Poetry:
Tertulia by Vincent Toro
A fluid, expansive new collection from a poet whose work “dazzles with [an] energetic exploration of the Puerto Rican experience in the new millennium” (NBC News).
Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro’s new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the “tertulia”) and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, the collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history. Toro draws from his own social justice work in various U.S. cities to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the connections between the personal and the political, the local and the global, in a book that both celebrates and questions the complexities of the human condition.
Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.
An Incomplete List of Names: Poems by Michael Torres; Foreword by Raquel Salas Rivera
An astonishing debut collection looking back on a community of Mexican American boys as they grapple with assimilation versus the impulse to create a world of their own.
Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions each play on our understanding of ourselves in An Incomplete List of Names. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates the artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him.
His description of his childhood is both idyllic and nightmarish, sometimes veering between the two extremes, sometimes a surreal combination of both at once. He calls himself “the Pachuco’s grandson” or REMEK or Michael, depending on the context, and others follow his lead. He worries about losing his identification card, lest someone mistake his brown skin for evidence of a crime he never committed. He wonders what his students—imprisoned men who remind him of his high school friends and his own brother—make of him. He wonders how often his neighbors think about where he came from, if they ever do imagine where he came from.
When Torres returns to his hometown to find the layers of spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind to prove their existence have been washed away by well-meaning municipal workers, he wonders how to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured.
Coming in October!
Soon to Be Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.
Click to Request a Galley on Edelweiss.
Spanish-Language Fiction:
Más allá by Julia Alvarez
Mas allá es una novela ágil y de prosa depurada. En momentos en los que reinan la confusión y el caos, la protagonista se plantea: ¿Le debemos algo a los que sufren, sean inmigrantes desconocidos o familiares cercanos? ¿Cómo podemos mantener la fe en los demás y en nosotros mismos en una realidad destrozada? Y, sobre todo, ¿cómo honramos a las personas que amamos y hemos perdido?
Poco después de jubilarse de la universidad donde enseñaba literatura, Antonia Vega, una escritora latina, pierde a su adorado esposo y su vida parece desmoronarse de repente. Hasta entonces parecía haber encontrado consuelo en la literatura que ama—las palabras de sus autores preferidos dan vueltas en su cabeza como plegarias—, pero la desaparición de su hermana, con su personalidad impredecible y su gran corazón, junto con la aparición de una inmigrante ilegal en el garaje de su casa, devuelven a Antonia a la dura realidad. En estas circunstancias, el mundo requiere más que palabras.
Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.