Our House In The Last World

A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in the debut––and most autobiographical––novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Winner of the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Rome Prize Hector Santinio is the younger son of Alejo and Mercedes, who moved to New York from Cuba in the mid-1940s. The family of four shares their modest apartment with extended relatives in Harlem, where homesickness and nostalgia are dispelled by nights of dancing and raucous parties. But life’s realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family’s adoptive land. When Mercedes takes Hector and his brother to visit Cuba, to better know her culture, Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to a terrifying period of hospitalization back in the United States where, isolated from his family, he loses much of his ability to speak Spanish. And it is this fracturing that sparks a lifelong quest to not only reconcile his Cuban identity with his American one, but to also understand his parents’ ambitions and anxieties within the country at large. In this profoundly moving account of immigrant life, Oscar Hijuelos displays, once again, his mastery over both character and language—and sets readers on an unforgettable journey of hope, longing, and self-discovery. Includes a Reading Group Guide.

A Cuban immigrant comes of age in NYC in this autobiographical debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York City, 1944. Hector Santinio is the younger son of Cuban immigrants who share an apartment with relatives in Spanish Harlem. Caught between his mother’s anxieties and his father’s macho expectations, Hector struggles to find an identity for himself while wrestling with both cultural and personal isolation. Meanwhile, his older brother Horatio falls into the womanizing and drinking pattern demonstrated by their father. This is a sweeping, poignant tale of the immigrant experience in New York—as a homeland the brothers have never visited exerts an undeniable influence on them both. A debut novel “marked by eloquently trimmed prose, great assurance, and uncompromising darkness,” Our House in the Last World demonstrates the storytelling powers that would later win Oscar Hijuelos so much acclaim (Kirkus).

A major anthology of Hispanic writing in the U.S., ranging from the early Spanish explorers to the present day.

With fascinating insights into how both ordinary and famous Cuban-Americans, including Desi Arnaz, Oscar Hijuelos, Gloria Estefan, and José Kozer, have lived 'life on the hyphen', this is an expanded, updated edition of the classic, award-winning study of Cuban-American culture.

This bibliography contains listings and annotations of all novels, anthologies, and short story collections written by the first, 1.5, and second generations of Cuban Americans. This work also contains listings and annotations of all secondary works dealing with this fiction, as well as related memoirs, autobiographies and interviews.

Explores the works and writers from post World War II America to today, including Stephen Crane, Arthur Miller, and Allen Ginsberg.

All that has happened in the past, all of Earth's history, man has created in his dream. and the end of time will come when man wakes up and realizes he has been dreaming. Suddenly, a young family wrests themselves from life in a North American city to seek a rustic existence close to nature and a circle of new friends in mountain valleys of British Columbia. But that is only one of the levels to this story. For David and Kelly (Siofra) are a mystic and a psychic on an out-of-the-ordinary quest inspired by higher energy presences, Moita and Amar. How will their experiment in communication between worlds illuminate the process of planetary rebirth that will accelerate years later . . . in the "awakening" of 2012 and beyond? "This time period is at crossroads. Paths before you lead into the future—some not pleasant, some extremely promising. We are here to help you choose the road that leads not to destruction but that leads to life, and to this change of man and his awareness, to the reuniting of [our] worlds." Among facets of this visionary yet down-to-earth adventure: helping persons in crisis to unlock their hearts, find their new balance, deepening our sense of community as a core group risks old selves in order to truly meet, confronting dark energies across lifetimes, undoing man's obsession with power, seeing that the planet's upheavals now mirror our own—as a vast evolution in consciousness comes full circle, aided by higher-dimensional beings, and the Earth Mother voicing her plea for man to awaken as a willing partner. "We are entering a New Age of humanity. Instead of man creating only on his own, set apart from the rest of the universe, this time he is involved in a co-creation—and we are the co-creators. Those who are here have arrived to help found a new world."

Boyhood friends, Jonathan and Bobby meet up again in New York after college. Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city’s erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare’s child. When Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise “their” child together and, with an odd friend called Alice, create a new kind of family.