Search results for ""author oscar hijuelos""

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

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When Raul Espana falls ill, his wife Lydia, who had enjoyed a life of luxury as the mayor's daughter in Cuba, finds herself cleaning the apartments of rich New Yorkers. Among her employers is Mr Osprey, a paragon of glamour and money who becomes involved in the lives of Lydia and her children.

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With “soaring, matchless prose,” a Pulitzer Prize winner pens a New York Times bestselling saga of the Montez O’Briens, a rambunctious family of Irish Cuban immigrants comprised of fourteen daughters—and one doggedly masculine son (Publishers Weekly).  Irish American Nelson O’Brien fell passionately in love with the poetess Mariela Montez while photographing the ravages of battle in Mariela's native Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After marrying, they moved to the United States to start a new life, settling in a small Pennsylvania town where Nelson took over the Jewel Box Movie Theater. Together, they had a remarkable fifteen children: fourteen daughters and one lone son. In Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, the lives, loves, and tragedies of this sprawling Irish Cuban family unfold. Over the course of a century, each member moves in and out of each other’s l

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Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise, the impeccably researched final novel from the author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, follows famed 19th century journalist-explorer Henry Stanley, his wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant, and Stanley's long friendship with Mark Twain, as they venture to Cuba in search of Stanley's father. Told through a fictitious manuscript and imagined correspondence between Stanley, Tennant, and Twain, Hijuelos captures not only the general style of educated 19th century, but manages to pull off the seemingly impossible task of channeling Mark Twain himself. The manuscript--in the works for decades--was found, whole and finished, by Hijuelos's widow after his death. As a companion to the novel, an ebook will be released of Hijuelos' short story "Another Spaniard in the Works" about a musician who meets John Lennon. In the '60s, Lennon had published a book of humorous writings and drawings called "A Spaniard in the Works" and now Hijuelos brings Lennon to life through music and literature.

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