Immigrants’ Lives: Three Novels

Angie Cruz is the author of the novels Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, a finalist in 2007 for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has published work in The New York Times, VQR, Gulf Coast Literary Journal, and other publications, and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. She is founder and editor in chief of Aster(ix), a literary and arts journal, and is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Sandra Cisneros calls Cruz’s latest novel Dominicana (Flatiron Books) “Gorgeous writing, gorgeous story.” Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. So on New Year’s Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights, where she is lonely and miserable. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family’s assets, leaving his younger brother Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family.

Ernesto Quiñonez was born in Ecuador, but arrived in New York City he was eighteen months old and was raised in El Barrio, East Harlem. He has written two previous novels Bodega Dreams and Chango's Fire. Set in Spanish Harlem, Taina (Vintage ) tells the story of Julio, a young Puerto Rican-Ecuadorian boy who, after hearing that Taina, a fifteen-year-old girl from his church, is pregnant, decides to believe what she and her mother say: that she is a virgin. That sets in motion not only his questioning of his parents, his religion, and even the basic building blocks of modern science but also wading into a web of lies and petty crime. Taína is a sweeping tale that delivers a subtle yet poignant critique of Latino culture weaved in an absorbing, magical narrative. Julia Álvarez, author of In the Time of Butterflies, said "Latin American magical realism leaps over any borders and ends up in the barrio of Spanish Harlem. A love story, coming-of-age story, a mystery, a whodunit story, and ultimately a story of true love in the broadest sense."

Born in Heilongjiang, China, Wang Xuan moved to Los Angeles when she was seven. She chose the name “Juliana” out of the back of a dictionary. Wang Juliana Xuan is a fiction editor at Fence and her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Cut, Gulfcoast, The Brooklyn Rail and The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. She teaches creative writing at UCLA. In Home Remedies (Hogarth), her first collection of short stories, Juliana Wang introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions. Her stories of love, family, and friendship capture the voices, faces and experiences of a new generation. In her review for the New York Times, May-Lan Tan noted that in Wang’s stories “every good thing comes at a price. Each character gets something he or she wants, but only by sacrificing something he or she needs.” The Financial Times said that Home Remedies “announce the arrival of an exciting, electric new voice.”