THE LATINA BOOK CLUB

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. A PECULIAR KIND OF IMMIGRANT’S SON By Sergio Troncoso Cinco Puntos Press   RELEASED TODAY ! Brilliant. Thought provoking. Extraordinary. Sergio Troncoso’s much anticipated new collection of stories takes us on journeys from Boston to Manhattan to West Texas. The book is full of unique characters going out into the world, struggling with two cultures, learning to be true to themselves. SUMMARY:   How does a Mexican-American, the son of poor immigrants, leave his border home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? With echoes of Dreiser’s American Tra...

    Our Book of the Month is one that will make you laugh, cry and scream.  And why shouldn't it? It's Halloween!!  Here's an excerpt.  Happy Reading!! “Gypsy Moon” WICKED REMNANTS By Manuel A. Meléndez Book cover by Carlos Aleman Illustrations by Henry Simon EXCERPT He rose from the black bushes like a solid shadow from death. His nightmarish yellow eyes stared at me with hatred. His enlarged pointed nostril flared as mucous dripped from its depth. His muscled hairy torso expanded to proportions of unbelievable massiveness. His arms were like tree trunks that ended into sharp huge claws. From behind me I heard Deanna scream and my own fears were increased for the safety of us. With foolishness or machismo bravado overcoming my anguish I clenched my hands into fist and prepared if not to save my life, to at least save Deanna’s. The wolf-like creature ripped through the shrubs, his almost human hoofs inching closer ...

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ― Dylan Thomas Poetry is an act of peace.  ― Pablo Neruda Mouthfeel Press April is Poetry Month and The Latina Book Club is celebrating with exciting and powerful poets that make us sit up and read and imagine.  Hence, we have chosen a book of the month that makes us do all that.   OCELOCIHUATL by Xánath Caraza brings a lump to your throat, a tear to your eye and a sigh to your heart.  It’s a beautiful, haunting bilingual poetry collection written in vibrant imagery about a Jaguar woman – a spirit guide, if you will –  that prowls and growls at the land, at society, at herself.  Ocelocíhuatl  straddles two worlds and struggles to unite those worlds and...

    The Latina Book Club's mission is to promote Latina / Latino authors, which we do through book reviews, author interviews, publicity announcements, book of the month selections, etc. A new feature we have added this year is " Writers Wednesdays ." The first Wednesday of each month we will feature a writer talking about ...writing. Happy Reading!     HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SHORT STORY COLLECTION—IN ORDER TO SELL IT by Teresa Dovalpage You may have published a dozen or more short stories in magazine, e-zines, anthologies and literary blogs, and you are quite proud of them. “They are so good,” you tell yourself. “Heck, they are gems!” But what to do with them? Not many publishers are interested in short story collections and some say straightforwardly that they won’t even look at them. “They don’t sell well,” “Readers prefer longer works” are common excuses. Yet short story collections are not totally unsellable. I have published three of t...

From the Press Release..... JUNGLE TALES (CUENTOS DE LA SELVA) is a collection of eight short stories by Horacio Quiroga that was published to enormous success in 1918. To this day, children in elementary schools across all Latin America read this book as a part of their curriculum. Quiroga captures the magic of the jungle, which is the scene of great and exciting adventures illuminated by nature in all its splendor. A place where snakes throw glamorous parties with flamingoes, stingrays join forces to fight off man-eating jaguars, and a giant tortoise carries a wounded man on its shell for hundreds of kilometers to bring him to safety. American English teacher, Jeff Zorrilla, and Argentine film critic, Natalia Cortesi have just published their fully illustrated English translation of the popular Latin American children’s book CUENTOS DE LA SELVA by Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga. With this book they bring all the fantasy and wonder of the jungles of South America to Engli...

   West End Press, Bilingual Fiction, Chicano Studies Sagel knows the voices of his people. Well, I should say, his adoptive people. A transplant from Colorado, Sagel fell in love with a local girl and stayed, only to find himself falling in love with her people as well. His stories are passionate, emotional, and full of local color and idioms. His stories invite you to pull up a chair and stay a while -- a little cafecito, a little juicy gossip. Sagel introduces us to the colorful, dynamic characters that have populated New Mexico for centuries, before the gringos ever even thought of getting on a boat and crossing over to this side of the pond. There’s Tia Juana who was hypochondriac and died during the “dripping season;” Tia Tomasita who knew the Sangre de Cristo mountains like the back of her hand but who got lost in the maze of streets in town; Pifi, the Korean vet, who loved his one-eyed roster more than his wife; Grandma who made a promise to el S...

     “You can’t tell a man’s story unless you are for sure about the facts.”   –Uncle Neto Anaphora Literary Press So begins this stark and poignant collection of intertwined short stories about the Ortiz family. At the center of these tales is Manito, who is trying to piece together the tattered bits of his father’s life. Unfortunately for Manito, his main source of information is his unreliable drunkard Uncle Neto, whose memories are full despair, hunger, resignation, and defeat. Neto and his brother Relles grew up in Southern Colorado on Spruce Street, best described as “a nest of cabrones,” where husbands are unfaithful and the girls wear a tough beauty; where wives make it all the way to the Greyhound terminal but never get on the bus to freedom; where boys grow up too fast in order to put food on the table; where the army doesn’t always make you a better man; where poverty and unemployment corrode family values. Each story in Jaramillo’s ...

   By day a bank lawyer; by night a writer. Such is the life of Chuy Ramirez, a lawyer for the Lone Star National Bank in McAllen Texas, who self-published his first book, STRAWBERRY FIELDS: A BOOK OF SHORT STORIES, last year. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, Chuy spent the past 10 years working on his book, which follows three generations of a Mexican family, as they make their way from Northern Mexico to South Texas. Its young protagonist, Joaquin, comes of age in the 1960s. He grows up ashamed of being poor, of working the strawberry fields, and is determine to have a different life. “The short stories of STRAWBERRY FIELDS,” said Jose Ramirez, Jr., author of SQUINT, “are like beautiful and colorful blouses made of delicate chiffon--revealing. The stories reveal the transformation of a young child becoming a man....a man appreciative of his raiz (roots). This is a book that crosses color and geographic boundaries. It is a book that will touch the soul of its rea...