The Long Night Of White Chickens

It is the story of Roger Graetz, raised in a Boston suburb by an aristocratic Guatemalan mother, and his relationship with Flor de Mayo, the beautiful young guatemalan orphn sent by his grandmother to live with family as a maid.

The Pulitzer Prize–finalist’s intimate autobiographical novel of a marriage cut tragically short is “a beautiful love story, and an extraordinary story of loss” (Colm Tóibín). In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married Aura Estrada. The two were deeply in love, and Aura was a gifted young writer on the cusp of her own brilliant career. But while on vacation only a month before their second anniversary, Aura died in a tragic accident. In Say Her Name, Goldman pours his feelings of love and unspeakable grief into a fictionalized account of their brief time together. Desperate to keep Aura alive in his memory, Goldman collects everything he can about her, delving deeply into the writings she left behind. From her childhood and university days in Mexico City to her studies at Columbia University, through the couple’s time in New York City and travels to Europe, Goldman composes a vivid and multifaceted portrait. Filled with “propulsive drama” (The Boston Globe), Say Her Name is a tribute to who Aura Estrada was and who she would’ve been, that “will also transport you into the most primal joy in the human repertoire—the joy of loving—and reveal it with aching vibrancy” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Often treated like night itself—both visible and invisible, feared and romanticized—Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the US. In her newest work, María DeGuzmán explores representations of night in art and literature from the Caribbean, Colombia, Central and South America, and the US, calling into question night's effect on the formation of identity for Latina/os in and outside of the US. She takes as her subject novels, short stories, poetry, essays, non-fiction, photo-fictions, photography, and film, and examines these texts through the lenses of nationhood, sexuality, human rights, exoticism, among others.

In this acclaimed novel, the Pulitzer Prize–finalist explores the perils, passions, and adventures of a young Nicaraguan immigrant trapped in Brooklyn. Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsday, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Publishers Weekly In the late 1980s, teenage Sandinista soldier and avowed communist Esteban Gaitán leaves Nicaragua to begin a new life in America. He soon arrives on a desolate Brooklyn pier with fourteen other men to form the crew of the ship Urus. Elias and Mark, the owners of the Urus, hold the men captive, forcing them to work in a vain attempt to make the rotting vessel seaworthy. Without the means to return home, Esteban remains a virtual prisoner, haunted by the loss of the woman he loved during the war. Eventually learning how to sneak off the ship, he makes nocturnal forays into Brooklyn, where he meets a Mexican immigrant named Joaquina, and begins to plot his permanent escape. Centering his novel around Esteban, but also telling the stories of his fellow landlocked sailors, Francisco Goldman proves once again that he is “a major talent of great style and soul” (The Miami Herald). “Often very funny . . . Here, a corner of Brooklyn becomes the exotic and foreign experience, and through Esteban’s eyes it is as mysterious and alluring as Tangiers.” —The Dallas Morning News

A Guatemalan-American writer returns to the Boston suburb of his youth in this American Book Award–winning novel “full of rebellious comedy and vitality” (New Yorker). A 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist In Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman’s “brilliantly constructed auto-fiction” (NPR), we meet Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer grappling with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up as the son of immigrants. Having fled Mexico after his journalism provokes the wrong people, Goldberg’s attempt to start fresh in New York. But even as he finds himself falling in love, he is drawn away yet again—back to his childhood home in the white, working-class suburbs of Boston. Frankie is beckoned there by a high school girlfriend who witnessed his youthful humiliations, and by his ailing mother, Yolanda, whose intermittent lucidity unearths forgotten pockets of the past. His brief trip is haunted by memories of his recently deceased father, the Guatemalan woman who helped raise him, and the high school bullies who called him “monkey boy.”

A devout woman finds herself adrift in late nineteenth–century Central America in this novel of “deep imagination, stylistic verve, and psychological acuity” (The Washington Post). Set in late nineteenth century Central America and New York City, The Divine Husband tells the story of María de las Nieves Moran, whose brief career as a nun is ended in the wake of revolution. Forced to make her way in the secular world, María is surrounded by an unforgettable cast of characters: José Martí, the poet and hero of Cuban independence and the first man María loves; Mack Chinchilla, the Yankee-Indio entrepreneur intent on winning her hand; a British diplomat setting up a political impostor plot; and Mathilde, the daughter whose birth—perhaps fathered by one of these men—ruins María’s reputation and launches her on a journey toward a new future. This joyfully imagined novel of ideas is populated by Indian girls, wandering Jewish coffee farmers, the founder of the rubber-balloon industry, and one of Latin America’s greatest and most complex men. Written by Pulitzer Prize–finalist Francisco Goldman, The Divine Husband is a sweeping, poetic novel rich in historical detail and vivid characterization. “Goldman echoes Flaubert, García Marquez, and even DeLillo.” —Bookforum

A crime novel, at once disturbing and perversely comforting, factually has been known to curtail social anxieties through the ‘open and shut case’ of its narrative form. But what happens to that form in a world where guilt and innocence are not easily assigned? Return to the Scene of the Crime takes place on the trope of an investigator returning to the post-colony on a quest for knowledge. In tandem with solving the case, they must also grapple with the complexities of their origins. Kamil Naicker shows how five authors defy generic expectations to illustrate the complexities of personal identity, transitional justice, and civil violence in the post-colonial world. Congregating novels set in South Africa, China, Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Somalia, this book intervenes in literary studies by bringing the trend of the returnee figure and exploring the possibilities of world-making through the explosion of a familiar form. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.