Most Popular Books by Oscar Hijuelos

When it was first published in 1989, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love became an international bestselling sensation, winning rave reviews and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that changed the landscape of American literature returns with a new afterword by Oscar Hijuelos. Here is the story of the memorable Castillo brothers, from Havana to New York''s Upper West Side. The lovelorn songwriter Nestor and his macho brother Cesar find success in the city''s dance halls and beyond playing the rhythms that earn them their band''s name, as they struggle with elusive fame and lost love in a richly sensual tale that has become a cultural touchstone and an enduring favorite.

A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in the debut––and most autobiographical––novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Winner of the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Rome Prize Hector Santinio is the younger son of Alejo and Mercedes, who moved to New York from Cuba in the mid-1940s. The family of four shares their modest apartment with extended relatives in Harlem, where homesickness and nostalgia are dispelled by nights of dancing and raucous parties. But life’s realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family’s adoptive land. When Mercedes takes Hector and his brother to visit Cuba, to better know her culture, Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to a terrifying period of hospitalization back in the United States where, isolated from his family, he loses much of his ability to speak Spanish. And it is this fracturing that sparks a lifelong quest to not only reconcile his Cuban identity with his American one, but to also understand his parents’ ambitions and anxieties within the country at large. In this profoundly moving account of immigrant life, Oscar Hijuelos displays, once again, his mastery over both character and language—and sets readers on an unforgettable journey of hope, longing, and self-discovery. Includes a Reading Group Guide.

It is 1953 and the mambo craze is sweeping America. Fresh from Havana, Cesar and Nestor Castillo arrive in New York City, bringing with them their vibrant, songs and dreams of love and fame. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel.

A beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns his pen to the real people and places that have influenced his life and literature. A comprehensive look into the mind of a writer. Born in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Oscar Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry-writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of a working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship with his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn with his mother in pre-Castro Cuba, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved. With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, Thoughts Without Cigarettes follows Hijuelos''s subsequent quest for his true identity — a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction, and which finds its most glorious expression in his best-known book,The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Illuminating the most dazzling scenes from his novels, Thoughts Without Cigarettes reveals the true stories and indelible memories that shaped a literary genius.

Hailed “the deepest and the best” of a Pulitzer-Prize winning author''s novels, a business man struggles to restore his faith after his son is killed (New York Times Book Review). In 1960s New York, Edward Ives is a picture of the American dream. Adopted as a child by a widowed print shop manager who helped him cultivate a love of drawing, he now has a successful career as an illustrator in advertising, a beautiful home with his wife and muse, Annie, and two loving children. But this idyllic life is brutally wrenched away when Ives’s 17-year-old son, Robert is murdered in a crime of opportunity that proves to be as random as it is senseless. Consumed by grief, Ives withdraws from the world. Grappling with a loss of faith—a force that has guided him steadfastly since childhood—he starts to question every aspect of human existence, contemplating what it really means to live an emotionally and spiritually fulfilling life. This mourning consumes him—until faces his son''s killer. Mr. Ives'' Christmas is a tender, passionate story of a man working to rediscover what it means to love and forgive after unspeakable tragedy. It is another tremendous achievement from one of America’s most talented writers. Includes a Reading Group Guide.

In this mesmerizing sequel to a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the "heart-stealing heroine" (Amy Tan) and muse of Cuban musician Nestor Castillo takes readers on the journey of a lifetime with this story of reinvention, romance, and revolution. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, María is the great Cuban beauty who stole musician Nestor Castillo’s heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings’ biggest hit, ‘Beautiful María of My Soul.’” Now in her sixties, María García y Cifuentes is the lady behind the song, living as an exile in Miami. But while she left Cuba decades ago, she has never forgotten Nestor. We now see the Mambo Kings’ story through Maria’s eyes—and as she thinks back to her days and nights in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the story unfolds. We meet her as an illiterate young woman with unspeakable, head-turning beauty who meets and falls in love with Nestor in Havana, but ultimately chooses to stay involved with a cruel, wealthy lover. When the Cuban Revolution intervenes, Maria and her daughter seek refuge in Miami. And as she finds community with other Cuban women and begins to take lessons at a local college, Maria finally goes from muse to the writer of her own story. Beautiful María of My Soul is a stunning act of reinvention, and another contemporary classic from an extraordinarily talented writer. Includes a Reading Group Guide.

It''s 1949, the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become, by night, stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created an enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos, is a luminous work of fiction inspired by the real-life, 37-year friendship between two towering figures of the late nineteenth century, famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos, who worked on the project for more than ten years, publishing other novels along the way but always returning to Twain and Stanley; indeed, he was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013. The resulting novel is a richly woven tapestry of people and events that is unique among the author''s works, both in theme and structure. Hijuelos ingeniously blends correspondence, memoir, and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long vanished world. From their early days as journalists in the American West, to their admiration and support of each other''s writing, their mutual hatred of slavery, their social life together in the dazzling literary circles of the period, and even a mysterious journey to Cuba to search for Stanley''s adoptive father, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise superbly channels two vibrant but very different figures. It is also a study of Twain''s complex bond with Mrs. Stanley, the bohemian portrait artist Dorothy Tennant, who introduces Twain and his wife to the world of sv©ances and mediums after the tragic death of their daughter. A compelling and deeply felt historical fantasia that utilizes the full range of Hijuelos'' gifts, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise stands as an unforgettable coda to a brilliant writing career.

Oscar Hijuelos vividly brings to life the joys, desires, and disappointment of American life witnessed through the experience of a formerly prosperous Cuban émigré named Lydia Espana--now a cleaning woman in New York. In magnetic prose, he juxtaposes Lydia''s tale with the stories of her clients, contrasting her experiences with the secret lives of those for whom she works. No one writes better of love or the pulse of a city, nor has any writer better captured the complexity inherent in the emigration experience; how assimilation is at once the achievement of dreams, yet also a loss of the past. Empress of the Splendid Season is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a novel filled with incantatory, rhythmic prose and rich in heartfelt vision.

With “soaring, matchless prose,” a Pulitzer Prize winner pens a New York Times–bestselling saga of a family of Irish-Cuban immigrants (Publishers Weekly). In The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Oscar Hijuelos brings to life the rambunctious Montez O’Brien family. In a small Pennsylvania town, Nelson O’Brien runs the Jewel Box Movie Theater, raising fourteen daughters and a son with his poet wife, Mariela Montez. Through the eyes of Margarita, the eldest daughter, the lives, loves and tragedies of the Montez O’Briens unfold. While reflecting on the life of Emilio, her doggedly masculine brother, Margarita also ruminates on the nature of femininity, family, sex, love, and earthly happiness. Her musings recall exhilarating adventures, eliciting tears and laughter, and tenderly reveal the bounteous heart of a warm, passionate family. At once lush, erotic, and gorgeously written, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien is a masterwork by one of America’s greatest writers.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author comes a “masterpiece” about a composer returning to his beloved homeland after WWII (Kirkus, starred review). The year is 1947. Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life once revolved around music and love, is finally returning home. En route to Habana, Cuba from Spain, he is a shadow of his former self, disillusioned after he was mistakenly sent to a camp during the Nazi occupation of France. In Habana, he escapes his anguish by reminiscing about his happiest moments before the war, when he lived a life of pleasure and excitement—and had a loving, if unrequited romance with Rita Valladares, the alluring singer who inspired Levis’s most famous composition, “Rosas Puras.” A tender homage to music, art, and a vibrant country at the edge of modernity, A Simple Habana Melody is a virtuoso performance from one of America’s most talented writers. Includes a reading group guide.

1949. Dos jóvenes cubanos músicos salen de la Habana y llegan al gran teatro de Nueva York. Es la temporada del mambo, y los hermanos Castillo, quienes trabajan duro durante el día, pronto se convierten en las estrellas de la noche en las salas de baile donde que su orquesta toca la música sensual y vibrante que les gana el título de Los Reyes del Mambo. Esta es su juventud -- una época que treinta años después, recordarán con nostalgia y afecto. En Los Reyes del Mambo Tocan Canciones de Amor, Oscar Hijuelos crea una obra rica y fascinante sobre la pasión y la muerte, la memoria y el deseo.

Corre el año 1947, e Israel Levis -- un compositor cubano cuya vida había sido un ensueño de música, amor y tristeza -- regresa a Cuba después de haber sido equivocadamente encarcelado durante la ocupación nazista de Francia. Cuando Levis regresa a La Habana, su mente vuelve al pasado al recordar su amor no correspondido por la hechizante Rita Valladares, una cantante para quien Levis había escrito su canción más famosa, "Rosas Puras." Esta composición que data de 1928, se convirtió en la rumba más célebre del mundo, y cambió para siempre el gusto por la música y el baile. Una historia de amor por el arte, la familia y la patria, Una Sen-cilla Melodía Habanera es una actuación de virtuosismo por parte de uno de nuestros más importantes escritores.

For the adult new reader, selections from the novel about Cuban-American musicians.

After buying a used copy of A Spaniard in the Works on an October evening in 1980, Victor Mercado, a twenty-seven-year old clerk, had a chance encounter that would change his outlook forever: he met the book''s author, John Lennon. It happened so quickly, though, that this struggling musician and Beatles fanatic didn''t get to say the things he needed to say. What unfolds is a desperate search for Lennon, revealing big dreams, missed opportunities, and a quest for fulfillment. Unearthed after Oscar Hijuelos''s sudden passing, and published for the first time, ANOTHER SPANIARD IN THE WORKS embodies the omnipresent themes from Hijuelos''s literary canon: Cuban identity, musicianship, and self-discovery.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Oscar Hijuelos comes a riveting young adult novel set in the late 1960s about a haunting choice and an unforgettable journey of identity, misidentity, and all that we take with us when we run away. He didn’t say good-bye. He didn’t leave a phone number. And he didn’t plan on coming back—ever. Fifteen-year-old Rico Fuentes has had enough of life in Harlem, where his fair complexion—inherited from an Irish grandfather—keeps him caught between two cultures without belonging to either. He pours his outsider feelings into a comic book Dark Dude, with his friend Jimmy illustrating. But when Gilberto, who’s always looked out for Rico, moves to Wisconsin and Jimmy loses himself to an insidious habit, Rico decides enough is enough. With Jimmy in tow, Rico runs away to the Midwest in search of Gilberto. The heavily white community feels worlds away from Harlem, and for the first time, Rico sees what it’s like to blend in—no longer the “dark dude” or the punching bag for the whole neighborhood. But the less energy Rico needs to put into proving he’s Latino, the less he feels like one. And the more he gets to know the people around him, the more it’s clear that a change in location doesn’t change human nature—and that there’s no such thing as a perfect community. Faced with the truth that there are things that can’t be cut loose or forgotten, things that keep him from ever having an ordinary white kid’s life, Rico must decide whether he can make a home in the place he ran to…or the one he ran from.

"The Scenario on exhibit, from 2002-2004 and measuring approximately 7 by 10 feet, illustrate commonplace scenes and objects derived from Rauschenberg''s vast archive of found and self-generated imagery. The paintings reveal a variety of environments including, rural America, southern, warm climate regions, and New York City. In his discussion of Rauschenberg''s photo-based, large-scale panels, Hijuelos states the Scenarios ''are massive ''super'' multilayered paintings that tell stories and cry out about American life; they arepanoramas that have an epic quality.'' Through a dramatic assemblage of images, the paintings become documentary narratives that serve as a historical record of a distinct time and place in the modern world." --Exhibition description from pacegallery.com.

Red Hot Salsa is an extraordinary collection of bilingual poems from the bestselling editor of Cool Salsa i think in spanish i write in english i want to go back to puerto rico, but i wonder if my kink could live in ponce, mayagüez and carolina tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en spanglish abraham in español --from "My Graduation Speech," by Tato Laviera Ten years after the publication of the acclaimed Cool Salsa, editor Lori Marie Carlson has brought together a stunning variety of Latino poets for a long-awaited follow-up. Established and familiar names are joined by many new young voices, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos has written the Introduction. The poets collected here illuminate the difficulty of straddling cultures, languages, and identities. They celebrate food, family, love, and triumph. In English, Spanish, and poetic jumbles of both, they tell us who they are, where they are, and what their hopes are for the future.

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.

In Empress of the Splendid Season, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos brings the joys and heartbreaks of twentieth-century America vividly to life: “resounds with sights, tastes, textures and even the humming ambience of deep, well-appointed brownstone apartments” (Los Angeles Times). Lydia España—once a wealthy, spoiled daughter of Cuba—works at a sewing factory in New York. Adjusting to her sharp change of circumstances, missing the days when her prosperous father provided her with every luxury, she ruminates on the incident that drove her away from her homeland in the late 1940s—until she falls in love with Raul, a kindhearted, working-class waiter who sees Lydia as the “Queen of the Congo Line” she used to be: the empress of "the most beautiful and splendid season, which is love.” Despite their age difference, a loving marriage follows, as well as two children. Lydia revels in her newfound happiness, but when Raul’s health declines, she finds her fortunes reversed yet again. Now working as a cleaning lady, Lydia can’t help but contrast her experiences with those of her clients, whose secret lives and day-to-day realities are so starkly different from her own—but over time, the role may prove to be just what she needs to secure a better life for her children. Written with absorbing, magnetic prose, this tenderly rendered novel follows a proud, hardworking woman through the ups and downs of her simple, sensible, and at times heart-wrenching life. It is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a lasting and expert portrayal of the highs and lows of chasing—and living—the “American Dream.” Includes a Reading Group Guide.

En Bella María de mi alma, Oscar Hijuelos regresa a la apasionada historia que comenzó hace veinte años en Los reyes del mambo tocan canciones de amor. María es la gran belleza cubana que rompió el corazón de Néstor Castillo. Es la inspiración del gran éxito de los Reyes del Mambo, Bella María de mi alma. Ahora, a los sesenta años y exiliada en Miami, María sigue siendo una belleza que llama la atención al pasar. Y, aunque dejó Cuba hace muchos años, no ha sido capaz de olvidar a Néstor. Al evocar esos días (y sus noches) en La Habana, María nos ofrece una perspectiva completamente nueva de la historia de los Reyes del Mambo. Bella María de mi alma es un deslumbrante acto de recreación, otro clásico contemporáneo de un escritor de talento extraordinario. Lacrítica ha dicho... «Disfruta el misterioso poder de un maestro que recrea su obra». Los Angeles Times «Se necesita mucho valor y un gran talento para crear una obra de la riqueza de Bella María de mi alma, e Hijuelos se ha salido con la suya». Cleveland Plain Dealer «Me enamoré al instante del alma gloriosa de Bella María de mi alma. Hijuelos ha dado vida a dos personajes inolvidables: la seductora protagonista y La Habana durante esos años que cambiaron su destino». Amy Tan, autora de El club de la buena estrella «En suma, estos encuentros finales logran una compleja intimidad que se ha gestado durante décadas y ha nacido de un anhelo palpable, como corresponde a un libro que, al fin y al cabo, lleva el título de una canción de amor». Chattanooga Free Press «Las mejores partes del libro, aparte de esas maravillosas historias de los hermanos Castillo nunca narradas hasta ahora, son las que muestran a Cifuentes en Miami, cuando los años le han dado la sabiduría de cuestionar algunas de sus decisiones». The Post and Courier «Retrato conmovedor de sueños rotos y remordimientos, esperanzas y desesperanzas, redescubrimientos y renacimientos, Bella María de mi alma atalos cabos sueltos de una historia de amor que murió con Néstor en Los reyes del mambo, pero que sigue muy viva en el alma de su canción, Bella María». Bookpage

En 1949, deux frères cubains musiciens et chanteurs, César et Nestor Castillo, quittent La Havane pour la grande scène de New York. C''est la vogue des musiques exotiques, du mambo, et les frères Castillo font danser les boîtes de nuit sur les mélodies sensuelles et rythmées de leur orchestre, les Mambo Kings. Ponctué par les rythmes frénétiques des boléros, des rumbas et des tangos, ce roman plein d''émotions et de passions, aussi obsédant et érotique qu''une salsa, nous entraîne dans un dépaysement total. Amour, passion et nostalgie ont fait de cette œuvre un best-seller international couronné par le prix Pulitzer du meilleur roman 1989.