Synopsis
A legendary Cuban-American storyteller enters the Library of America series with a volume gathering three seductive and profound novels about family, desire, music, and loss
Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) is one of the most acclaimed Latino writers of the last half century. Here are three classic novels that opened a window on the Cuban-American experience, announcing a major new voice in our literature.
Hijuelos launched his career with Our House in the Last World (1983), a resonant and nuanced novel portraying one immigrant’s family story in midcentury Manhattan. At its center is Hector Santino, whose family has left the “home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi Arnaz” to settle in New York City, where their ebullient expectations of the good life in America lead, inevitably, to myriad disappointments and adjustments.
In his best-known novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)—a book that Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he would have liked to have written—Hijuelos offers an unforgettable tribute to Latin music and its place in American culture around the middle of the twentieth century. Earning Hijuelos the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded a Latino novelist, The Mambo Kings is also about the fleeting nature of fame and celebrity as well as the more profound themes of love, desire, and family.
The poignant Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995), which Hijuelos once noted was an attempt to write a Christmas story “without being corny,” takes up themes of loss and redemption in a story that poses the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.
This Library of America edition marks the entrance of Hijuelos into the series with a deluxe hardcover edition that includes as well a newly researched chronology of the author’s life.
À propos de l?auteur
Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) was born in New York City, a second-generation Cuban-American. His first novel, Our House in the Last World was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He became the first Latino writer to win the Pulitzer Prize when it was awarded to his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, later adapted as a film (1992) and a stage musical (2005). He went on to publish six other novels (including the Young Adult book Dark Dude) and the memoir Thoughts without Cigarettes; his novel Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise was published posthumously.
Lori Marie Carlson-Hijuelos is an editor, translator, novelist, and anthologist whose collections include Cool Salsa, Red Hot Salsa, and A Path to the World: Becoming You. She is author of the novels The Sunday Tertulia, The Flamboyant, and A Stitch in Air, and the translator of Marjorie Agosín’s La luz del deseo (The Light of Desire). She is the widow of Oscar Hijuelos, whom she married in 1998.
Laura P. Alonso-Gallo is Professor of English at Barry University in Miami. A scholar of Latino, Caribbean, and Cuban American fiction, she is editor of the collections El sexo en la literatura, Evolving Origins, Transplanting Cultures: Literary Legacies of the New Americans, American Voices: Interviews with American Writers, and Identidad y postnacionalismo en la cultura cubana.
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