Cristina García was born in Havana and grew up in New York City. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award and has been widely translated. Ms. García has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. She lives in California's Napa Valley with her daughter and husband.
The Palace of Eros (2024) Caro de Robertis "The Palace of Eros is a riveting, sublime, magical, and wildly subversive meditation on love, sex, mythology, and belonging ... brilliant and beautiful and erotic and insightful and unlike anything I've ever read. I couldn't ask for more."
Blood in the Cut (2024) Alejandro Nodarse "Alejandro Nodarse's Blood in the Cut brings to vivid life a Cuban American world that has been invisible in literature-until now. A place of illegal hunters and deadly swamps, of competing allegiances and the violences at the brutal heart of exile. Mr. Nodarse writes with rare insight, sensitivity, and beauty. An extraordinary debut!"
A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (2023) Raul Palma "Raul Palma's novel, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, offers us hilarity and heartbreak in equal measure. With lush prose and an unerring eye, Palma chronicles the substrata of Miami - the human costs of immigration, poverty, debt, discrimination, and, yes, ghosts - beneath the city's breezy, tropical surface. A pitch-perfect debut."
Holler, Child (2023) LaToya Watkins "Holler, Child forced me to stop everything I was doing and surrender to its stories - richly turbulent with faith, violence, sorrow, reckoning, and exquisite tenderness. LaToya Watkins weaves together character and place with a poetry that evokes Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. A heart-stopping collection."
The Apartment (2023) Ana Menéndez "A dazzling inquiry into the disquietudes of time and place, of past and present, and the global exiles who inhabit the realms in-between. Menendez's exquisitely-wrought stories - emanating from the lifespan of one modest Miami apartment - offer us no less than the world. A masterful, poetic achievement."
The Bandit Queens (2023) Parini Shroff "Parini Shroff's debut novel is a rollicking mash-up of adventure story, thriller, dark revenge, and comedy. Rooted in a rural village in India--and led by the pariah widow Geeta, whom everyone believes to have killed her husband--a handful of women band together to take back their lives, and take down the patriarchy. An immensely enjoyable read!"
A Woman of Endurance (2022) Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa "A Woman of Endurance is a new classic of Caribbean literature. With exquisite, patient, poetic prose, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa illuminates the world of 19th-century Puerto Rican haciendas and the slavery on which they depended. By telling this story through the eyes of Pola, one of those slaves, Llanos-Figueroa has written the grand epic that Pola - and all the other forgotten women of endurance - richly deserve."
Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry "Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry exquisitely chronicles the pervasive losses and loves of unforgettable 'perestroika generation' characters. The Orchard is a fitting homage to the great Chekhov himself."
All Day Is a Long Time (2022) David Sanchez "David Sanchez's first novel - brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking - is the definitive handbook to hell and back . . . A stunning debut."
The President and the Frog (2021) Carolina De Robertis "A work of stunning insight and beauty, The President and the Frog is a song of hope in despairing times, a meditation on freedom and survival, on the quiet exultations of the ordinary (think Neruda's Odes to Common Things). A luminous, opulent, and unforgettable novel."
The Taste of Sugar (2020) Marisel Vera "A majestic work with the grand sweep of history and the intimacy of a compelling dream. Marisel Vera has written a compassionate, unforgettable, richly detailed novel about colonialism in all its guises, offering us little-known stories from the past that are essential to understanding the present."
Death Comes in through the Kitchen (2018) (Havana Mystery, book 1) Teresa Dovalpage "A lively murder mystery with a Cuban culinary twist. Teresa Dovalpage brings Havana--with its rampant shortages, schemes, and sensuality--to vivid life. Studded with food blogs by a murdered Cuban chef and the efforts of her hapless American fiancé, this is a dark comedy bursting with cultural history and recipes."
Salt Houses (2017) Hala Alyan "A striking debut of the disruptions and dispersals of exile, Salt Houses is a heartfelt portrait of the Palestinian diaspora. Powerful, lyrical, and deftly layered with multiple voices, Hala Alyan has done the near impossible: illuminated a half-century of wrenching history with great intimacy."
Amigoland (2009) Oscar Cásares "By turns hilarious and heartbreaking... Think Sunshine Boys go south of the border, but funnier... and infinitely more poignant."
