1	Music The Nortec Collective captures the character of Tijuana; the big plans of Babasonicos. read more...
2	Film & TV Paula Garces carves out a career by sheer determination; a chat with Milka Duno. read more...
3	Books Riverhead Books is emerging as a top chronicler of the Hispanic experience. read more...
4	Ask Julie Evaluating mutual funds in volatile times. read more...
5	Calendar Our monthly list of premier events throughout the U.S. read more...

BOOKS

Good Housekeeping

Publishing imprint Riverhead Books offers some of the best reads on the Hispanic experience

By VICTOR CRUZ-LUGO

Edgy and urbane, and boasting some of the leading Hispanic talents in the marketplace, the Riverhead imprint of publishing house Penguin Group USA is emerging as one of the top chroniclers of our experience.
Most recently, Riverhead was behind the publication of one the most critically acclaimed books of 2007, began 2008 by introducing readers to a compelling new female voice with Costa Rican roots, and is now preparing to publish a deliciously idiosyncratic look at Mexico City.
To be specific, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao proved the darling of the nation’s critics last year. Meanwhile, writer and budding historian Sylvia Sellers-García, who grew up in Central America and the U.S., wrote the ingeniously conceived and elegantly paced 2008 debut novel When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep.
And next month, expat writer David Lida, who abandoned New York City for the vibrant charms south of the border, publishes First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century.
Only the second book and first novel published by Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the tale of the young and brilliant misfit Oscar of the apparently cursed Wao family who make their way from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey, haunted by their links to dictator Rafael Trujillo.
At press time, The Brief Wondrous Life snared the National Book Critics Circle fiction award and the John Sargent Sr. Prize for a first novel, was named the best work of fiction of 2007 by both Time and New York Magazine, made numerous other media best-of-the-year lists, and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an NAACP Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction award. It is hard to imagine a more successful first novel for any writer, never mind a Hispanic practitioner.
Sellers-García’s When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is an exploration of the secrets that can define us, and the price we must sometimes pay to know ourselves.
Set in rural post-civil war Guatemala, the novel is the story of American Nítido Amán, a young man who is both driven and adrift. When his father’s memory is wiped out by Alzheimer’s, Nítido goes on the trail of his own origins as if fearful they too will vanish.
As a character who doesn’t know where he was born, Nítido defies his mother, leaves the U.S. and makes his way toward the Guatemalan village of his parents’ birth. At a place called Río Roto, he is mistaken for a priest and plays along to learn the village’s (and his parents’) secrets.
Sellers-García, who is a doctoral history candidate when she is not writing fiction, demonstrates formidable storytelling in this debut work. She has a keen command of the politics and history that surround her main characters, and is also capable of sustained and well-placed flights of lyricism. Her poetic bursts are so well-placed they remain, to her credit, almost invisible.
To put it simply, When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is a very well constructed first book. One senses in Sellers-García’s the struggle between the poet and the historian as they reach toward common ground. She will be measured in the future by how well she negotiates that tension.
A unique and penetrating analysis of contemporary Mexico City, David Lida’s First Stop in the New World, available next month, posits the megalopolis as a promise and a lesson of what is to come.
Lida, a former New Yorker who was once terrified of the Third World excesses of Mexico City, has become one of the area’s most fervent boosters. After nearly 20 years living there, he understands the good, the bad and the ugly of his adopted home. Indeed his acquired knowledge of Mexico City is actually an expression of his love for it.
As he turns his pen and his peculiar sensibility to the subject of Mexico City, he emerges with a book as audacious as the strategies for survival and advancement adopted by the everyday folk who live there.
First Stop is cleverly organized in enigmatically titled vignettes that delve headlong into Mexico City’s improbable mysteries. How does the richest man in the world, for example, manage his business in a city where half the people are poor?
Lida straddles journalism and the literary, both of which you need to truly tell the tale of this larger-than-life city. In reading, we come to see Mexico City as a “hypermetropolis,” a global city of the future.
With these three publications, and other Riverhead offerings, the publishing imprint is proving that it has its finger on the pulse of our experience.

Top Shelf

Consider stocking your bookcase with some of these new titles sure to inspire, inform or entertain.

Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire
Unearthing Deep South Narratives from
a Texas Graveyard
By Marie Theresa Hernández
Texas A&M University Press
$24.95
Having grown up the daughter of a funeral director in Texas, author Hernández has a unique insight into the lives and deaths of Mexican Americans, the inspiration for this narrative that tells not only their stories, but also the stories of the cemetery (and the hidden history) where they are laid.

Drugs, Thugs and Divas
By O. Hugo Benavides
University of Texas Press
$24.95
Why are soap operas and telenovelas just so appealing? Because they speak the universal language of drama and reflect cultural norms, societal establishment and social rebellion—and strangely enough, their story lines unite people of diverse countries, argues Benavides.

Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea
By Sergio Ramírez
Curbstone Press
$15.95
Ramirez weaves a tale of poetry, history, politics and rebellion in this tale that spans 50 years. In the early 1900s in Nicaragua a writer pens a little poem on a little girl’s fan, 50 years later, the poet, the little girl and the fan might have unknowingly inspired an swell of discontent.

The King’s Gold
An Old World Novel of Adventure
By Yxta Maya Murray
HarperCollins
$14.95
When Lola Sanchez receives a mysterious document from a stranger that reveals a hidden treasure, she jumps off into adventure. In search of Montezuma’s gold, Lola tries to unscramble the messages and make sense of the document’s riddles only to discover it has been cursed. And she must also stay two steps ahead of treasure hunters hot on the map’s trail.

Mexican Plays
Edited By Elyse Dodgson
Nick Hern Books
$30.95
A compilation of Mexican plays that include some of the country’s great new works such as On Insomnia and Midnight by Edgar Chias, The Sanchez Huerta Girl Killed Herself by Claudia Rios and Seven Eleven by Ivan Olivares.

Delirium
By Laura Restrepo
Vintage International $13.95
Set in an unstable war-torn region in Colombia, Agustina begins to lose hold of reality while her fiercely loyal husband refuses to let her go mad. Restrepo weaves a tapestry of a culture trying to stay sane and exhaustively maintain social norms.

Ghosts of El Grullo
By Patricia
Santana
University of New Mexico Press $24.95
In this tale of growing up and finding oneself in between two worlds, a young woman leaves her beloved small town in Mexico to attend college, but soon must return home following her mother’s death.

En Español
La Ciudad Sin Tiempo
By Enrique Moriel
Rayo $14.95
A young attorney’s assistant uncovers the mystery surrounding the death of a high-society Barcelona gentleman, unearthing truths about her own family’s past.