The Faith Healer Of Olive Avenue

Publisher description

A collection of interconnected short stories chronicles the world of the inhabitants of one Mexican-American neighborhood, whose diverse lives continue to cross paths in unexpected ways.

The long-awaited first novel by the award-winning author of two impressive story collections explores the sinister side of desire in Bakersfield, California, circa 1959, when a famous director arrives to scout locations for a film about madness and murder at a roadside motel. Unfolding in much the same way that Hitchcock made Psycho—frame by frame, in pans, zooms, and close-ups—Mun~oz’s re-creation of a vanished era takes the reader into places no camera can go, venturing into the characters’ private thoughts, petty jealousies, and unrealized dreams. The result is a work of stunning originality.

Table of contents

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book’s focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of “the closet” and “coming out” and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as “isolated” and in need of “outreach.” Contributors focus on a range of topics—some obvious, some delightfully unexpected—from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.

These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Mu&ñ oz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but were regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the everyday struggles and immense challenges faced by their families.The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters— straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old— are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve the men they love who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently— perhaps literally— haunted.In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It' s a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.

In Scales of Captivity, Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive or cast-off child in Latinx and Chicanx literature and art between chattel slavery’s final years and the mass deportations of the twenty-first century. She shows how Latinx expressive practices expose how every rescaling of economic and military power requires new modalities of capture, new ways to bracket and hedge life. Through readings of novels by Helena María Viramontes, Oscar Casares, Lorraine López, Maceo Montoya, Reyna Grande, Daniel Peña, and others, Brady illustrates how submerged captivities reveal the way mechanisms of constraint such as deportability ground institutional forms of carceral modernity and how such practices scale relations by naturalizing the logic of scalar hierarchies underpinning racial capitalism. By showing how representations of the captive child critique the entrenched logic undergirding colonial power, Brady challenges racialized modes of citizenship while offering visions for living beyond borders.

"A collection of short stories from the skirt edge of Latino Los Angeles, revealing the space between stereotypes"--Provided by publisher.