2024 Adult Hispanic Heritage Month

Claudio's apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can...

In a small Midwestern community people and wildlife begin behaving in violently erratic ways that prevent a taxidermist from revealing his findings about a mysterious hallucinogen.

"A Long Petal of the Sea meets Luis Alberto Urrea's The House of Broken Angels in this epic historical romance about a Mexican woman and an Irish-American soldier who fall in love in the thick of the Mexican-American War"--

"They are the Beautiful Ones, Loisail's most notable socialites, and this spring is Nina's chance to join their ranks, courtesy of her well-connected cousin and his calculating wife. But the Grand Season has just begun, and already Nina's debut has gone disastrously awry. She has always struggled to control her telekinesis--neighbors call her the Witch of Oldhouse--and the haphazard manifestations of her powers make her the subject of malicious gossip....

When Rosayra “Rosy” Pablo Cruz made the agonizing decision to seek asylum in the United States with two of her children, she knew the journey would be arduous, dangerous, and quite possibly deadly. But she had no choice: violence—from gangs, from crime, from spiraling chaos—was making daily life hell. Rosy knew her family’s one chance at survival was to flee Guatemala and go north. After a brutal journey that left them dehydrated, exhausted,...

"In the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, in the aftermath of their mother's passing, two siblings spend a final weekend together in their childhood home. Seeing her brother, Rafa, careening toward a place of no return, Rufina devises a bet: if they can make enough money performing for privileged tourists in the plaza over the course of the weekend to afford a plane ticket out, Rafa must commit to living. If not, Rufina will make her peace...

"When you live in an adopted country, when you're an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death." A series of female characters--the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student--have identities which are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act....

"Detective Lauren Medina sees the calling card at a murder scene in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, she knows the Pied Piper has returned. When another teenager is brutally murdered at the same lagoon where her sister's body was found floating years before, she is certain that the Pied Piper is not just back, he's looking for payment he's owed from her. Lauren's torn between protecting the city she has sworn to keep safe, and keeping a promise...

The American characters here find themselves waiting, hoping, and living in rural Mexico, a land with the power to enchant, repulse, captivate, and change all who pass through it.