Most Popular Books by Gary Soto

Chato-the coolest cat in the barrio-loves to party. So when he learns that Novio Boy has never had a birthday party, Chato decides to throw him a surprise pachanga. He gets right to work-inviting everyone in the neighborhood, cooking up a feast, arranging for music and a pinata, and even ordering a special cake. Chato''s sure that he''s thought of everything. But when it comes time for the party, he realizes that he forgot the most important thing of all-Novio Boy! With a lively text featuring Spanish words throughout, and bright, bold artwork, this sequel to Chato''s Kitchen is truly a cause for celebration

When ten-year-old Rudy breaks an older boy''s Discman at a baseball game, he and his friend Alex come up with a variety of ways to make money to pay for a new one.

A collection of poems brings to life themes of growing up, family, friendship, and first love.

"Chato and Novio win a cruise but are disappointed to find that everyone else on board is a dog, and things go from bad to worse when the dogs party themselves sick and it is up to the cats to find help."--Title page verso

The award-winning author of "Baseball in April and Other Stories" deftly captures all the angst, expectation, and humor that comes with first love in this swift, lighthearted romance.

Ninth-grade Rudy has asked eleventh-grade Patricia out on a date, and to his amazement she has agreed. Now Rudy has to come up with the money, the poise, and the conversation to carry it off. This one-act play, by turns heartwarming and heart-wrenching, follows Rudy from his desperate search for guidance from family and friends through the hilarities of the date itself, all the way to its successful conclusion. “To present a new kind of coming-of-age story, a play is the way.”--American Bookseller

A collection of poetry by Chicano poet Gary Soto.

In this new collection of poems, Gary Soto once again displays his impressive poetic range- funny, sad, urbane, nave. He digs deeply into his California hometown of Fresno and explores the wonder of the everyday in an ever-shifting world. In Soto''s poems, precocious Berkeley dogs practice feng shui, raisins march out of a factory under the nose of the night watchman, and shirts are ironed "with the steam of Mother''s hate." In the darker second part of the collection, Soto offers 12 "film treatments for David Lynch." What skincrawling delight Lynch could conjure with the tightwad furniture salesmen who meets his death in a pool "blue as toilet wash." Then, back from the brink, Soto presents in the final section a single long poem as graceful and meditative as anything he''s written to date.One Kind of Faithconfirms Gary Soto''s immense talent and will bring his voice to an even wider audience.

El autor, nacido en California y de ascendencia mexicana, con varias obras publicadas, escribe especialmente sobre los mexicano-americanos. Este entretenido libro, dirigido especialmente a niños entre los seis y los ocho años, hará reír y gozar a los pequeños con la divertida historia que relata los pormenores que ocurren cuando un hombre anciano no escucha a su mujer. La mujer, quién se dirige hacia la barbacoa le pide a su marido le traiga el puerco, el cuál será asado para luego ser degustado como plato principal. El anciano confundido, reflexiona preguntándose a sí mismo el por qué su mujer le habrá pedido que le lleve la puerta, y sin más toma la toma en lugar del cerdo y se la lleva a su esposa. La obra está deliciosamente ilustrada y muestra como los errores pueden transformarse en hechos divertidos.

At Little League, Luis is catching fly balls, stealing bases, and hitting like a champ. But there is a problem: he thinks he''s getting good luck from the snacks he samples at the supermarket before every game. Then one day his mom goes directly to the field and he has a horrible practice. The day she skips the stop at the store before a game, he strikes out twice. Luckily, Luis''s father understands and convinces him that practice and concentration matter much more than any superstition.

A collection of short stories about Mexican American youth growing up in California''s Central Valley.

What do Gaby Lopez, Michael Robles, and Cynthia Rodriguez have in common? These three kids join other teens and tweens in Gary Soto''s new short story collection, in which the hard-knock facts of growing up are captured with humor and poignance. Filled with annoying siblings, difficult parents, and first loves, these stories are a masterful reminder of why adolescence is one of the most frustrating and fascinating times of life.

We met these spirited best friends in Fearless Fernie, and now they''re taking on the world! From boxing a kangaroo in Australia to craving Mexican food in Taiwan, or riding a runaway camel in Egypt and eating cheese as holey and smelly as their socks in Switzerland, the globe is their imaginary playground. Gary Soto''s accessible and humorous poems will elicit nods of recognition and bursts of laughter as readers enjoy this outrageous jaunt around the world. Praise for Fearless Fernie: Hanging Out With Fernie and Me

At age thirteen, best friends Ronnie and Joey suddenly feel like chimps--long armed, big eared, and gangly--and when the coach humiliates Joey in front of a girl, he climbs up a tree and refuses to come down.

¡Viva la causa! ¡Viva César Chávez! Up and down the San Joaquin Valley of California, and across the country, people chanted these words. Cesar Chavez, a migrant worker himself, was helping Mexican Americans work together for better wages, for better working conditions, for better lives. No one thought they could win against the rich and powerful growers. But Cesar was out to prove them wrong -- and that he did.

A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award nominee Gary Soto''s first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California''s fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences—of the poet as a young man, his friends, family, and neighbors—the poems are spare but expansive, with Soto''s voice as important as ever. This welcome new edition has been expanded with a crucial selection of complementary poems (some previously unpublished) and a new introduction by the author.

Soon he discovers that he is in his office at a Baptist college in the Simi Valley of Southern California, a place that is familiar to many Americans as the home of many of the jurors who tried and convicted Rodney King in the 1990s. Silver has become a professor of English! Moreover, as he soon discovers to his horror, he is having an affair with the wife of the college president. And someone seems to be selling drugs on campus and Silver seems to be involved though he doesn''t know how."--BOOK JACKET.

A chorus of essays from a variety of voices, backgrounds, and experiences, exploring what it means to be human and true to yourself. What does it mean to be yourself? To be born here or somewhere else? To be from one family instead of another? What does it mean to be human? Collected by Lori Carlson-Hijuelos, A Path to the World showcases essays by a vast variety of luminaries—from Gary Soto to Nawal Nasrallah to Ying Ying Yu, from chefs to artists to teens to philosophers to politicians (keep your eyes peeled for a surprise appearance by George Washington)—all of which speak to the common thread of humanity, the desire to be your truest self, and to belong. Contributors include: Lori Marie Carlson-Hijuelos, Joseph Bruchac, Jacinto Jesús Cardona, William Sloane Coffin, Pat Conroy, Mario Cuomo, Timothy Egan, Alan Ehrenhalt, Shadi Feddin, Ralph Fletcher, Valerie Gribben, Alexandre Hollan, Molly Ivins, Geeta Kothari, Jeremy Lee, Yuyi Li, Emily Lisker, Kamaal Majeed, Madge McKeithen, Nawal Nasrallah, Scott Pitoniak, Anna Quindlen, Michael J. Sandel, Raquel Sentíes, David E. Skaggs, Gary Soto, Alexandra Stoddard, KellyNoel Waldorf, George Washington, and Ying Ying Yu.

A collection of poems about childhood.

In order to look more like his father, Ricky borrows a mustache from a school costume, but when he loses it on the way home his father comes up with a replacement.

Inspired by Shakespeare, an award-winning poet creates “smart, surprising and affecting [poetry] . . . Poems that are easy to read and difficult to forget” (David Scott Kastan, Yale University). In his engaging new collection, National Book Award finalist Gary Soto creates poems that each begin with a line from Shakespeare and then continue in Soto’s fresh and accessible verse. Drawing on moments from the sonnets, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and others, Soto illuminates aspects of the source material while taking his poems in directions of their own, strategically employing the color of “thee” and “thine,” kings, thieves, and lovers. The results are inspired, by turns meditative, playful, and moving, and consistently fascinating for the conversation they create between the bard’s time and language and our own here and now. “I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him.” —Gerald Stern, National Book Award–winning poet “Soto insists on the possibility of a redemptive power, and he celebrates the heroic, quixotic capacity for survival in human beings and the natural world.” —Publishers Weekly “Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . Intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults.” —Martin Espada, National Book Award–winning poet “Shakespeare’s words are never more alive than when they are being seized upon, twisted, remade and made anew. Gary Soto, a brilliant recycler, has laden his ship with old gold. Himself a brilliant recycler, Shakespeare might well have been pleased.” —The Norton Shakespeare

This inspiring story of Jessie De La Cruz, the United Farmer Workers, and la Causa is told as only Gary Soto—novelist, essayist, poet, and himself a field laborer during his teens—can tell it, with respect, empathy, and deep compassion for the working poor. A field worker from the age of five, Jessie knew poverty, harsh working conditions, and the exploitation of Mexicans and all poor people. Her response was to take a stand. She joined the fledgling United Farm Workers union and, at Cesar Chavez''s request, became its first woman recruiter. She also participated in strikes, helped ban the crippling short-handle hoe, became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, testified before the Senate, and met with the Pope. Jessie''s life story personalizes an historical movement and shows teens how an ordinary woman became extraordinary through her will to make change happen, not just for herself but for others.

An original novella from award-winning children''s author and poet Gary Soto Jason Rodriguez is a twelve-year-old who never had much luck—until he wins $3,700 in the lottery and becomes an Instant Winner! Jason can''t believe he''s won the lottery and decides he will use the money to get his crazy Uncle Mike out of jail. That''s where the real adventure begins.

In this unique collection of short stories, the small events of daily life reveal big themeslove and friendship, youth and growing up, success and failure. Calling on his own experiences of growing up in California''s Central Valley, poet Gary Soto brings to life the joys and pains of young people everywhere. The smart, tough, vulnerable kids in these stories are Latino, but their dreams and desires belong to all of us. En esta excepcional coleccin de cuentos, los pequeos acontecimientos de la vida diaria revalan grandes temas: el mor y la amistad, la juventud y el crecimiento, el xito y el fracaso. Partiendo su propia experiencia de haber crecido en California, el poeta chicano Gary Soto recrea las alegras y tristezas de los jvenes de todas partes. Los listos, duros y vulnerables chinos de estos cuentos son latinos, pero sus sueos y deseos son los mismos de todo el mundo.

¡Vamos de pachanga! A Chato—el gato más chévere del barrio—le encantan las fiestas. Cuando se entera de que su amigo Novio Boy nunca ha tenido una fiesta de cumpleaños, Chato decide organizarle una pachanga de sorpresa. Inmediatamente Chato se pone a trabajar, pero cuando llega el día señalado, se da cuenta de que se ha olvidado de lo más importante . . . Con un texto divertido y llamativas ilustraciones, la continuación de Chato y su cena es verdaderamente algo para celebrar.

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Gary Soto''s eleventh book of poems for adults, HUMAN NATURE is full of arresting images and surprising scenarios--and probably more uncanny opening lines than in any book you''ll read all year. These poems pretend to be "simple" portraits of remembered youth and of life at the other end, where a man is walking into old age. Yet their surface transparency gives way to burrowing (often troubling) insights. Over and over he finds arresting, surprising cause for pausing and looking further, deeper, in the motley comedy of street life and family life and the erotic realm of memory. There is comedy on almost every page, but also the sadness of perceived futility. As a poet, Soto''s characteristic vantage is bemused and amused, both. He has long been praised for his rich descriptions and strange imaginative leaps; he is well known for poems of childhood that are really open and exposed, and his work has connected powerfully with teenaged readers and their teachers. New in HUMAN NATURE are the bittersweet poems of aging, as an artist wonders aloud how something as quiet and delicate as a poem can hold its own in the raucous, rude, careening mayhem of our national public life. What should a poet do? Keep singing, of course. The muse must be given homage, no matter how worn out she looks. And even in his bruised uncertainty, Soto always brings a distinctive verbal mischief and descriptive beauty to the task of praising our not always very pretty world.

Hector and his best friend Mondo enjoy many exciting adventures when they take a six-day bike trip from their East Los Angeles neighborhood to the Santa Monica beach during summer vacation.