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Prolific poet, essayist, and short story writer, Arturo Islas (1938-1991) is well known for his two insightful novels, The Rain God and Migrant Souls. His untimely death to AIDS truncated a productive and influential career that has left a yawning gap in Latino letters. Islas was a dedicated, thoughtful, and style-conscious writer, who promoted a sense of responsibility to community and art for both writers and critics. The quality of his commitment was matched by the example he set in delving into the esthetics and psychology of gay creativity, an exploration that took him to uncompromising confrontations with his own traditional upbringing. Islas has made his mark as a writer of the U.S.-M...
"The Rain God is a lost masterpiece that helped launch a legion of writers. Its return, in times like these, is a plot twist that perhaps only Arturo Islas himself could have conjured. May it win many new readers." — Luis Alberto Urrea, bestselling author of The House of Broken Angels and The Hummingbird’s Daughter "Rivers, rivulets, fountains and waters flow, but never return to their joyful beginnings; anxiously they hasten on to the vast realms of the Rain God." A beloved Southwestern classic—as beautiful, subtle and profound as the desert itself—Arturo Islas's The Rain God is a breathtaking masterwork of contemporary literature. Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexico b...
This first critical biography of Arturo Islas (19381991) brings to life the complex and overlapping worlds inhabited by the gay Chicano poet, novelist, scholar, and professor. Gracefully written and deeply researched, Dancing with Ghosts considers both the larger questions of Islas's life—his sexuality, racial identification, and political personality—and the events of his everyday existence, from his childhood in the borderlands of El Paso to his adulthood in San Francisco and at Stanford University. Frederick Aldama portrays the many facets of Islas's engaging and often contradictory personality. He also explores Islas's coming into the craft of poetry and fiction—his extraordinary...
A critical biography of novelist, poet, and former Stanford professor Arturo Islas (1938-1991).
In a fascinating collection of interviews, renowned author Maxine Hong Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and the role of Asian-Americans in our history. As her books always hover along the hazy line between fiction and memoir, she clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created.
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A posthumous novel by the pioneering Chicano fiction writer--a tragi-comic tale revealing a new side to Arturo Islas's talent.
Provides short biographies of Latino American writers and journalists and information on their works.
Border Matters locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. José Saldívar examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse, exciting assortment of texts—corridos, novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art, and essays. Saldívar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of U.S. cultural studies, one that challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas. This intellectually adventurous, politically engaged study applies borderlands and diaspora theory to Chicano cultural practices i...
"What unites these essays is a common focus on the 'social construction' of racial categories and a desire to expose the exercise of racism and its intersection with other forms of social domination such as class, gender, and ethnicity . . . Fascinating."--Multicultural Review "The coming together of theoretical, multiethnic, and 'on-the-ground' perspectives makes this book a particularly valuable contribution to the discourse on race."--Paula Giddings "Timely and thoughtful. . . contributes to our understanding of how race operates as a social process and in the contextualization of power and status."--Contemporary Sociology "A treasure chest full of gems. Virtually every article is fascina...