American in Translation: A Novel in Three Novellas is a womans journey from the Vietnam era to the present. Each novella represents a pivotal time in the life of Inmaculada, a young Spanish woman who has recently immigrated to the United States. American in Translation is Concha Alborgs first novel written in English. In preparation for this book, the author taped conversations with her father, who fought on the liberal side during the Spanish Civil War; collected magazine and newspaper ar...

#11 in the New York Times '100 Best Books of the 21st Century'Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us in t...

Planting Dreams: Book OneFoster dreams of getting away, but after his father's death, he has to take over the family dairy farm. It soon becomes clear his father hasn't been doing the best job of running it, so not only does Foster need to take over the day-to-day operations, he also needs to find new ways of bringing in revenue.Javi has no time to dream. He and his family are migrant workers, and daily survival is a struggle, so they travel to any...

In this literary debut, a young girl tells of her traumatic life via a Mexican card game in a "heart-wrenching tale of violence, love and a broken family" ( Los Angeles Times).With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, she retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through her beloved deck of lotería cards, a Lati...

A New York Times Notable Book, an NPR Best Debut of the Year, and a PEN/Hemingway finalist.These linked stories follow Sabina as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora, and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.In "Lucho," Sabina's family—already "foreigners in a town of blancos"—is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of viole...

The intimate and revealing memoir of the multi-award-winning telenovela and music superstar.In Growing Stronger, international superstar Thalia opens up for the first time about her rewarding and sometimes devastating life experiences. She reveals her most personal struggles-the loss of her father when she was just five years old, the shocking kidnapping of her sister, and her battle with a life-altering disease-and reflects on her greatest blessings, like...

Patricia Woodard had always wanted to live and work in a foreign country, but the dream seemed to be elusive. Then in the summer of 1975 while she was teaching summer school in her hometown of Whiteville, North Carolina, she received a telegram offering her a teaching position in Bogot, Colombia. Excited and stunned to finally be realizing her dream, she accepted the offer and set off for a year high on a plateau in the Andes Mountains. Several years later, she returned to Colombia, this t...

Javier Torres was a sweet, plump, and very unpopular child. But over the years, he turned himself into a gorgeous gym god. The problem is he's also become an egotistical snob. But one day his arrogance pisses off the wrong little old lady, and he wakes up to find that, like the Prince in Beauty and the Beast, he's been transformed into something from his personal nightmares. Javier has nowhere to go but back home, where to his surprise, he is greeted with open arms, not just by the family ...

A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the pastKevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care.

For fans of Matt de la Peña and Sandra Cisneros comes a novel about family and identity, where Violet Paz prepares for her quinceañero and learns about her Cuban heritage.Violet Paz has just turned fifteen, a pivotal birthday in the eyes of her Cuban grandmother. Fifteen is the age when a girl enters womanhood, traditionally celebrating the occasion with a quinceañero.But while Violet is half Cuban, she’s also half Polish, and more importantly, she feels 100...

The internationally acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature gives us a deeply moving tale of loss, grief, and healing: a lyrically told, richly illustrated fable for grown-ups about a woman’s search for a cat who goes missing in the wake of her mother’s death.The word “orphan” might not seem to apply to a fifty-three-year-old woman. Yet this is exactly how Sandra feels as...

"Seven-year-old Juan lives in Guatemala, a place of stunning beauty and grim economic reality. Abandoned by his mother, Juan lives with his grandmother and shines shoes. He passionately wants to attend school, but fears Grandmother will say no. Finally gathering his courage, he is surprised when she not only agrees to send him to school but also chides him about the importance of standing up for himself. Juan tells this bittersweet story, which reads smoothly and powerfully on several leve...