The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Rosetta Books
ISBN 13 : 0795337604
Total Pages : 537 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestseller: A “lush, tipsy, all-night mambo of a novel about Cuban musicians in strange places like New York City” (People). Brothers Nestor and Cesar Camillo arrive from Cuba in 1949 with dreams of becoming famous mambo musicians. This memorable novel traces the arc of the two brothers’ lives—one charismatic and macho, the other soulful and sensitive—from Havana to New York, from East Coast clubs and dance halls to the heights of musical fame. The basis for a popular film, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love “tells of the triumphs and tragedies that befall two men blessed with gigantic appetites and profoundly melancholic hearts. . . . Hijuelos has depicted a world as enchanting as that in Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera” (Publishers Weekly). “Rich and provocative . . . a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community and a time.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1538740621
Total Pages : 445 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1538722267
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Our House in the Last World written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1401395945
Total Pages : 402 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beautiful Maria of My Soul written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : HarpPerenM
ISBN 13 : 9780060845308
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The tie-in written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by HarpPerenM. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101528826
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thoughts without Cigarettes written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1455561509
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times "Editor's Choice"A Vanity Fair "Best Book for History Buffs"An Amazon Best Book of November 2015A David Baldacci Top Pick for Fall 2015A Boston Globe Fall 2015 PickAn EW.com Blockbuster Novel PickOne of Newsday's "20 Best Books to Read this Fall"One of Men's Journal's "7 Best Books of November" 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 séances 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416994750
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dark Dude written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0060927542
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mr. Ives' Christmas written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1996-08-30 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hijuelos' novel tells the story of Mr. Ives, who was adopted from a foundling's home as a child. When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is very much a product of his time. He has a successful career in advertising, a wife and two children, and believes he is on his way to pursuing the typical American dream. But the dream is shattered when his son Robert, who is studying for the priesthood, is killed violently at Christmas. Overwhelmed by grief and threatened by a loss of faith in humankind, Mr. Ives begins to question the very foundations of his life. Part love story--of a man for his wife, for his children, for God--and part meditation on how a person can find spiritual peace in the midst of crisis, Mr. Ives' Christmas is a beautifully written, tender and passionate story of a man trying to put his life in perspective. In the expert hands of Oscar Hijuelos, the novel speaks eloquently to the most basic and fulfilling aspects of life for all of us.

Author : Oscar Hijuelos
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0060928700
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Empress of the Splendid Season written by Oscar Hijuelos and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2000-01-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.