The Barbarian Nurseries - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Barbarian Nurseries write by Héctor Tobar. This book was released on 2011-09-27. The Barbarian Nurseries available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011 The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . . With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
Barbarian Nurseries
Barbarian Nurseries - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Barbarian Nurseries write by Héctor Tobar. This book was released on 2011-09-27. Barbarian Nurseries available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Scott Tores is a thirty-something Mexican-American with a beautiful, blonde wife, Maureen, a mansion outside L.A., and a staff of servants to tend his lawn, clean his house, and care for their three children. But as the novel opens, all the servants have been let go, save for Araceli, the maid. Scott has fallen on hard times after a failed investment and in order to make ends meet has been forced to cut costs. With the recent addition of a newborn into their family, tension escalates, and the couple soon part ways, Maureen to a spa with their baby, Scott to a female co-worker’s house. Both believe the other is caring for the children. Araceli, who has never raised children before, spends more time daydreaming about her former life as a Mexico City artist than caring for the kids. When she starts to run out of food, she spirits the children off on an absurd adventure through Los Angeles in search of their Mexican-American grandfather. When Maureen and Scott finally return home, they panic, thinking Araceli has kidnapped the children. Soon a national media circus explodes over the “abduction.” The Barbarian Nurseries is a lush, highly populated social novel in the vein of Tom Wolfe with a bit of T.C. Boyle that explores dashed dreams through a city divided.
The Tattooed Soldier
The Tattooed Soldier - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Tattooed Soldier write by Héctor Tobar. This book was released on 2014-10-07. The Tattooed Soldier available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army. This chance encounter between Antonio and his family's killer ignites a psychological showdown between these two men. Each will discover that the war in Central America has migrated with them as they are engulfed by the quemazones—"the great burning" of the Los Angeles riots. A tragic tale of loss and destiny in the underbelly of an American city, The Tattooed Soldier is Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Héctor Tobar's mesmerizing exploration of violence and the marks it leaves upon us.
The Last Great Road Bum
The Last Great Road Bum - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Last Great Road Bum write by Héctor Tobar. This book was released on 2020-08-25. The Last Great Road Bum available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville’s Favorite Books of 2020. In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador—a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live—a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.
Translation Nation
Translation Nation - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Translation Nation write by Héctor Tobar. This book was released on 2006-04-04. Translation Nation available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the smash hit Deep Down Dark, a definitive tour of the Spanish-speaking United States—a parallel nation, 35 million strong, that is changing the very notion of what it means to be an American in unprecedented and unexpected ways. Tobar begins on familiar terrain, in his native Los Angeles, with his family's story, along with that of two brothers of Mexican origin with very different interpretations of Americanismo, or American identity as seen through a Latin American lens—one headed for U.S. citizenship and the other for the wrong side of the law and the south side of the border. But this is just a jumping-off point. Soon we are in Dalton, Georgia, the most Spanish-speaking town in the Deep South, and in Rupert, Idaho, where the most popular radio DJ is known as "El Chupacabras." By the end of the book, we have traveled from the geographical extremes into the heartland, exploring the familiar complexities of Cuban Miami and the brand-new ones of a busy Omaha INS station. Sophisticated, provocative, and deeply human, Translation Nation uncovers the ways that Hispanic Americans are forging new identities, redefining the experience of the American immigrant, and reinventing the American community. It is a book that rises, brilliantly, to meet one of the most profound shifts in American identity.
