Half Resurrection Blues

First in the ghostly urban fantasy series by New York Times bestselling author Daniel José Older “Because I’m an inbetweener—and the only one anyone knows of at that—the dead turn to me when something is askew between them and the living. Usually, it’s something mundane like a suicide gone wrong or someone revived that shouldn’ta been.” Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death. One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NYCOD’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead. But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own life—and death.…

Carlos Delacruz is just following orders when he offs the only other half-dead guy in New York. It should've been a job like any other, but then Carlos agrees to protect the dying man's sister Sasha from the Council, the very sprawling bureaucracy of death that Carlos works for. Maybe he does it because she's also like him: partially resurrected, a ghoulish mistake with no past, living in the undercurrents of the city. Or maybe it's just the endearing way she looks out at him from the dead man's crinkled Polaroid. Either way, Carlos sets out to find the mysterious woman before the Council does and quickly ends up tangled in a nefarious web of necromancers, hipsters, and tiny demons with unpronounceable names.

The complex nature of globalization increasingly requires a comparative approach to literature in order to understand how migration and commodity flows impact aesthetic production and expressive practices. This special issue of Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics explores the trans-American dimensions of Latina/o literature in a trans-Atlantic context. Examining the theoretical implications suggested by the comparison of the global North-global South dynamics of material and aesthetic exchange, this volume highlights emergent Latina/o authors, texts, and methodologies of interest in for comparative literary studies. In the essays, literary scholars address questions of the transculturation, translation, and reception of Latina/o literature in the United States and Europe. In the interviews, emergent Latina/o authors speak to the processes of creative writing in a transnational context. This volume suggests how the trans-American dialogues found in contemporary Latina/o literature elucidates trans-Atlantic critical dialogues.

The Writers Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction offers a refreshing approach to the craft of fiction writing. It takes a single page from forty contemporary novels and short stories, identifies techniques used by the writers, and presents approachable exercises and prompts that allow anyone to put those techniques to immediate use in their own work. Encompassing everything from micro (how to "write pretty") to macro (how to "move through time space"), and even how to put all together on page one, this a field guide for anyone who wants to start writing now (or get some shiny new gear for their fiction toolbox.)

Arthur Miller’s penultimate play, Resurrection Blues, is a darkly comic satirical allegory that poses the question: What would happen if Christ were to appear in the world today? In an unidentified Latin American country, General Felix Barriaux has captured an elusive revolutionary leader. The rebel, known by various names, is rumored to have performed miracles throughout the countryside. The General plans to crucify the mysterious man, and the exclusive television rights to the twenty-four-hour reality-TV event have been sold to an American network for $25 million. An allegory that asserts the interconnectedness of our actions and each person’s culpability in world events, Resurrection Blues is a comedic and tragic satire of precarious morals in our media-saturated age.

Children’s and young adult literature has become an essential medium for identity formation in contemporary Latino/a culture in the United States. This book is an original collection of more than thirty interviews led by Frederick Luis Aldama with Latino/a authors working in the genre. The conversations revolve around the conveyance of young Latino/a experience, and what that means for the authors as they overcome societal obstacles and aesthetic complexity. The authors also speak extensively about their experiences within the publishing industry and with their audiences. As such, Aldama’s collection presents an open forum to contemporary Latino/a writers working in a vital literary category and sheds new light on the myriad formats, distinctive nature, and cultural impact it offers.

The New York Times bestselling author of Half-Resurrection Blues returns in a new Bone Street Rumba Novel--a knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death. The streets of New York are hungry tonight... Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York's ghostlier problems. This time it's a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn's Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals--and is bound to take more. The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie's botánica, where she worked. But the closer they've gotten, the more she's seeing the world from Carlos's point of view. In fact, she's starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that--because whatever is bringing out the dead, it's only just getting started.

Excited about the opportunity to go on tour with his band, much like his great-uncle Ray did, eighteen-year-old Flynn Robinson uproots his entire world, drops out of school, and ends his relationship with Julianne to pursue his dreams of rock-and-roll.