Description
Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking novel, set in New York City during the 1990s, is guaranteed to be unlike any literary experience you have ever had. Acclaimed Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi has crafted this creative and insightful examination of the Hispanic-American experience, taking on the voices of a variety of characters–painters, poets, sculptors, singers, writers, filmmakers, actors, directors, set designers, editors, and philosophers–to draw on their various cultural, economic, and geopolitical backgrounds to engage in lively cultural dialogue. Their topics include love, sex, food, music, books, inspiration, despair, infidelity, jobs, debt, war, and world news. Braschi’s discourse winds throughout the city’s public, corporate, and domestic settings, offering an inside look at the cultural conflicts that can occur when Anglo Americans and Latin Americans live, work, and play together. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a literary liberation,” this energetic and comical novel celebrates the contradiction that makes contemporary American culture so wonderfully diverse. First published in Spanglish in 1998 to rave reviews, this is the first English publication of Yo-Yo Boing!
Trade Review“An in-your-face assertion of the vitality of Latino culture in the U.S.” —New York Daily News “Exciting―as much a performance piece as a novel.” —Harold Augenbraum, National Book Foundation “A force to reckon with.” —Ilan Stavans, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry “The best demonstration yet of Braschi’s extraordinary virtuosity…It is also a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and everyday life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.” —Jean Franco, Columbia University “A rush of gloriously nuanced sentences that teeter between the grotesque and burlesque…The text transmutes poetry into novel, into screenplay, dialogue, and by extension to more and sometimes unidentified variants.” —Doris Sommer, Harvard University “It bristles with lively…literary conversation.” —Kirkus Reviews “It’s what I call superb writing. It’s as much a performance piece as it is a novel.” —Barney Rosset, The Evergreen Review “A literary liberation.” —Publishers Weekly “Braschi writes beautiful[ly]…Playing with word forms in a musical, rhythmic way…Reflecting the way language is actually used.” —Library Journal
