Leaving Tabasco


Book Description

A young woman encounters strange events in her Mexican hometown in this novel by an author who “immerses us...in her wickedly funny and imaginative world” (Latina). Leaving Tabasco tells of the coming of age of Delmira Ulloa, raised in an all-female home in Agustini, in the Mexican province of Tabasco. In Agustini it is not unusual to see your grandmother float above the bed when she sleeps, or to purchase torrential rains at a traveling fair, or to watch your family’s elderly serving woman develop stigmata, then disappear completely, to be canonized as a local saint. But as Delmira becomes a woman, she will set out on a search for her missing father, and must make a choice that could mean leaving her home forever, in a tale filled with both depth and delightful mystery that poses questions about just how real the real world is. “To flee Agustini is to leave not just a town but the viscerally primal dreamscape it represents.”— The New York Times Book Review “Vibrant...Each chapter is an adventure.”—The Boston Globe “We happily share with [Delmira] her life, including the infinitely charming town she inhabits [and] her grandmother’s fantastic imagination.”—The Washington Post Book World




The Book of Anna


Book Description

Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.




What You Left Behind


Book Description

Jessica Verdi, the author of My Life After Now and The Summer I Wasn't Me, returns with a heartbreaking and poignant novel of grief and guilt that reads like Nicholas Sparks for teens. It's all Ryden's fault. If he hadn't gotten Meg pregnant, she would have never stopped her chemo treatments and would still be alive. Instead he's failing fatherhood one dirty diaper at a time. And it's not like he's had time to grieve while struggling to care for their infant daughter, start his senior year, and earn the soccer scholarship he needs to go to college. The one person who makes Ryden feel like his old self is Joni. She's fun and energetic—and doesn't know he has a baby. But the more time they spend together, the harder it becomes to keep his two worlds separate. Finding one of Meg's journals only stirs up old emotions. Ryden's convinced Meg left other notebooks for him to find, some message to help his new life make sense. But how is he going to have a future if he can't let go of the past? "Ryden's story is a moving illustration of how sometimes you have to let go of the life you planned to embrace the life you've been given. A strong, character-driven story that teen readers will love."—Carrie Arcos, National Book Award Finalist for Out of Reach




Cleopatra Dismounts


Book Description

An enchanting, audacious retelling of the Cleopatra story from a Mexican novelist who is “a luminous writer” and “a masterful spinner of the fantastic” (The Miami Herald). In Cleopatra Dismounts, Carmen Boullosa has written a remarkable imaginary life of one of history’s most legendary women. Dying in Marc Antony’s arms, Cleopatra bewails the end of her political career throughout ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Mediterranean. But is this weak woman the true Cleopatra? Through the intervention of Cleopatra’s scribe and informer Diomedes, Boullosa creates two deliriously wild other lives for the young monarch—a girl escaping the intrigues of royal society to disguise herself and take up residence with a band of pirates; and the young queen who is carried across the sea on the back of a magical bull, to live among the Amazons. Magical, multifaceted, and rippling with luminous imagination, Cleopatra Dismounts confirms Carmen Boullosa as an important international voice. “Wildly entertaining.” —The Washington Post “A highly appealing and poetic interpretation of the Egyptian queen’s doomed fate.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The Mexican fabulist Carmen Boullosa reinvents Cleopatra as a character for modern feminism to conjure with.” —The Boston Globe




They're Cows, We're Pigs


Book Description

A dark, thought-provoking adventure that “artfully evokes the blood-soaked reality of 17th-century pirates” (Entertainment Weekly). This “wryly humorous, satiric, and often macabre novel” (Library Journal) follows Jean Smeeks, a Flemish thirteen-year-old who signs up as an indentured servant with the French West Indies Company, but instead winds up a slave on the notorious island of Tortuga. Over time, he learns the arts of herbal medicine and surgery—a skill that allows him to join a band of Caribbean pirates. Contrasting Jean’s romantic pull toward the “Brethren of the Coast”—an all-male society pursuing socialist, anti-colonialist ideals—with the brutal reality of their lawless existence, They’re Cows, We’re Pigs is a “unique and memorable” novel whose “pirate world leaves you as a good book should: thinking” (The Boston Herald).




A Narco History


Book Description

The term "Mexican Drug War" misleads. It implies that the ongoing bloodbath, which has now killed well over 100,000 people, is an internal Mexican affair. But this diverts attention from the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the carnage. It's not just that Americans buy drugs from, and sell weapons to, Mexico's murderous cartels. It's that ever since the U.S. prohibited the use and sale of drugs in the early 1900s, it has pressured Mexico into acting as its border enforcer--with increasingly deadly consequences. Mexico was not a helpless victim. Powerful forces within the country profited hugely from supplying Americans with what their government forbade them. But the policies that spawned the drug war have proved disastrous for both countries. Written by two award-winning authors, one American and the other Mexican,A Narco History reviews the interlocking twentieth-century histories that produced this twenty-first century calamity, and proposes how to end it.




Swing Low


Book Description

"One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular school teacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. Now his daughter Miriam, an award-winning writer, has given her father a voice for his whole story. In Swing Low, Miriam recounts Mel's life as she imagines he would have told it, right up to the day he took his final walk. Toews takes us deep inside the experience of depression, but she also gives us winsome and hilarious tales of country life: growing up on a farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a strong, happy family in the midst of private torment." --




The Last Chinese Chef


Book Description

This exhilarating story is the transporting tale of how the sensual, romantic elements of haute Chinese cuisine become the perfect ingredients to lift the troubled soul of a grieving American woman.




Before


Book Description

"Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."—Alvaro Mutis Part bildungsroman, part ghost story, part revenge novel, Before tells the story of a woman who returns to the landscape of her childhood to overcome the fear that held her captive as a girl. This powerful exploration of the path to womanhood and lost innocence won Mexico's two most prestigious literary prizes. Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico's leading writers, has published nearly twenty novels. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft, won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award.




Let’s Talk About Your Wall


Book Description

Major writers from Mexico weigh in on U.S. immigration policy, from harrowing migrant journeys to immigrant detention to the life beyond the wall Despite the extensive coverage in the U.S. media of the southern border and Donald Trump's proposed wall, most English speakers have had little access to the multitude of perspectives from Mexico on the ongoing crisis. Celebrated novelist Carmen Boullosa (author of Texas and Before) and Alberto Quintero redress this imbalance with this collection of essays—translated into English for the first time—drawing on writing by journalists, novelists, and documentary-makers who are Mexican or based in Mexico. Contributors include the award-winning author Valeria Luiselli, whose Tell Me How It Ends is the go-to book on the child migrant crisis, and the novelist Yuri Herrera, author of the highly acclaimed Signs Preceding the End of the World. Let's Talk About Your Wall uses Trump's wall as a starting point to discuss important questions, including the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders. An essential resource for anyone seeking to form a well-grounded opinion on one of the central issues of our day, Let's Talk About Your Wall provides a fierce and compelling counterpoint to the racist bigotry and irrational fear that consumes the debate over immigration, and a powerful symbol of opposition to exclusion and hate.