A legendary Cuban-American storyteller enters the Library of America
series with a volume gathering three seductive and profound novels about
family, desire, music, and loss
Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) is one of the most acclaimed Latino writers
of the last half century. Here are three classic novels that opened a
window on the Cuban-American experience, announcing a major new voice in
our literature.
Hijuelos launched his career with Our House in the Last World
(1983), a resonant and nuanced novel portraying one immigrant's family
story in midcentury Manhattan. At its center is Hector Santino, whose
family has left the "home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi
Arnaz" to settle in New York City, where their ebullient expectations of
the good life in America lead, inevitably, to myriad disappointments and
adjustments.
In his best-known novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
(1989)--a book that Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he would have liked to
have written--Hijuelos offers an unforgettable tribute to Latin music
and its place in American culture around the middle of the twentieth
century. Earning Hijuelos the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded a
Latino novelist, The Mambo Kings is also about the fleeting nature of
fame and celebrity as well as the more profound themes of love, desire,
and family.
The poignant Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995), which Hijuelos once noted
was an attempt to write a Christmas story "without being corny," takes
up themes of loss and redemption in a story that poses the age-old
question of why bad things happen to good people.
This Library of America edition marks the entrance of Hijuelos into the
series with a deluxe hardcover edition that includes as well a newly
researched chronology of the author's life.
