Reyna Grande

Struggling to cope as her family falls apart, eleven-year-old Luz María Castillo retreats into her beloved set of lotería cards, a Mexican game featuring riddles and vibrant images.

Homebase is the coming of age story of Rainsford Chan in 1950s and '60s California. Orphaned at fifteen, he attempts to claim America as his homebase, and his personal history is interwoven with dreams, stories, and letters of his family's life in America.

Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, Enrique's Journey recounts the unforgettable quest of a Honduran boy looking for his mother, eleven years after she is forced to leave her starving family to find work in the United States.

Partly a reflection on the culture of machismo and partly an exploration of the author's boyhood spent in his sister's hand-me-down clothes, Martinez delves into the complicated relationships between extended family and the inner conflicts that result when the desire to Americanize clashes with the inherent need to defend one's manhood in an aggressive, archaic patriarchal farming culture.

After Wopper Barraza's fourth drunk driving violation, the judge orders his immediate deportation. Now he has to move back to Michoacan. When he learns that his longtime girlfriend is pregnant, the future looks even more uncertain. This immigrant saga in reverse is a story of young people who must live with the reality of their parents' dream. We know this story from the headlines, but up to now it has been unexplored literary territory.

"David Martinez is like an algebra problem invented by America;he's polynomial, and fractioned, full of identity variables and unsolved narrative coefficients. . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart." Tony Hoagland

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America's newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tracing the lives and aspirations of Russians living in Moscow and Brooklyn. In the title story, set during the Second World War, Galina, a gentile, offers refuge to a Jewish friend and her daughter, only to find herself increasingly resentful of their presence in her home.