Border Crossings: Three Novels

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult series The Shadowshaper Cypher, named as one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read; the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, the middle-grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, and Star Wars: Last Shot. You can find his thoughts on writing, read dispatches from his decade-long career as an NYC paramedic, and hear his music on his website, YouTube and on Twitter. His novel The Book of Lost Saints (Imprint) is an evocative multigenerational Cuban-American family story of revolution, loss, and family bonds. It tells the story of Marisol, who vanished during the Cuban Revolution, disappearing with hardly a trace. Now, shaped by atrocities long-forgotten, her foul-mouthed spirit visits her nephew, Ramón, in modern day New Jersey with the hope that her presence will prompt him to unearth their painful family history. Ramón does launch a haphazard investigation into the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search. Along the way, he falls in love, faces a run-in with a murderous gangster, and uncovers the lives of the lost saints who helped Marisol during her imprisonment. The Book of Lost Saints is a haunting meditation on family, forgiveness, and the violent struggle to be free. The reviewer at NPR.org praised Older´s writing noting "The more of Older’s books I read, the more I come to grips with how many ways there are to tell a story—and just how many stories there are to be told."

Cásares, Oscar (Estados Unidos, 1964) Narrador, ensayista y profesor de escritura creativa. Enseña en la University of Texas en Austin. Ha sido reconocido con la Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2006), el James A. Michener Award de la Copernicus Society of America, Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2002) y el Dobie Paisano Fellowship del Texas Institute of Letters de la University of Texas 2002). Ha dado a conocer el volumen de cuentos Brownsville: Stories (2003) y la novela Amigoland (2009). Cásares trae a la feria su novela De donde venimos, Vintage Español, donde relata el drama vivido por una familia mexicanoamericana que se ve involucrada, en contra de su voluntad, en el tráfico ilegal de inmigrantes.

Steph Cha is the author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough. She’s the noir editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today.  Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay (Ecco). In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She’s distraught that her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace’s understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale. But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence. Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, Bluebird writes, “Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles’s violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding...It’s a touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city.”