It’s July and it’s getting hot out there! Here’s a look at new releases and other news to keep you cool:
• Already out: Diana López, author of Choke, has a new book for young readers, Ask My Mood Ring How I Feel, about a young girl coping with her mother’s cancer.
• In Blood Tango by Annamaria Alfieri, the Argentine police is looking for a killer who may have wanted to murder Eva Peron.
• A Spanish family faces a curse in which the women suffer doomed loved affairs in Cristina Lopez Barrio’s The House of Impossible Loves.
• Marta Acosta, author of the Casa Dracula books, has written the novel The She-Hulk Diaries, about the female Incredible Hulk.
• Rubén Martínez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, which follows a family that immigrates from Mexico to America, has been reissued with a new afterword. His book Desert America: A Journey Through Our Most Divided Landscape, which explores the changes in the American West, is now out in paperback.
• July 9: In Lotería: A Novel, Mario Alberto Zambrano uses a piece of Mexican culture to convey the story of one family’s tragedy.
• July 16: Reporter Nola Céspedes, who first appeared in Joy Castro’s Hell or High Water, is back in Nearer Home, investigating the murder of her former journalism professor.
Awards:
• The 2013 International Latino Book Award winners include Carmen Tafolla’s Rebozos, Leila Cobo’s The Second Time We Met, Pat Mora’s The Beautiful Lady: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Malin Alegria’s Border Town #1: Crossing the Line, Joy Castro’s Island of Bones, the Las Comadres Para Las Americas anthology Count on Me: Tales of Sisterhood and Fierce Friendships and Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us.
• Winners of the 25th annual Lambda Literary Awards, according to The Wall Street Journal, include Cherrie Moraga, who received the Pioneer Award, and Benjamin Alire Saenz, who won awards for his books, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.
• Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo won the 2013 International Rómulo Gallegos Prize for Fiction, one of Latin America’s most prestigious literary awards.
Writing conferences:
• The Comadres and Compadres Writers Conference will take place Oct. 5 at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y. The event will include panelists and one-on-one sessions with agents and editors.
Writing contests:
• Lee & Low Books has opened submissions for its New Voices Award, given to an unpublished children’s book written by a writer of color. Deadline is Sept. 1.
Other features:
• The new website Latinas for Latino Literature have created a summer reading program for children. NPR focused on the issue of diversity in children’s literature, and Publishers Weekly noted the First Book organization is trying to expand the market with The Stories for All Project.
• La Casa Azul Bookstore, the East Harlem, N.Y., bookstore run by Aurora Anaya Cerda that specializes in Latino literature, has had a busy summer. It celebrated its first anniversary in June, was honored by The White House for its crowdfunding efforts and was featured in Fox News Latino.
• The latest investigation into the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda may have found a potential killer, says ABC News.
• Alisa Valdes has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the movie version of her novel The Dirty Girls Social Club.
• Publishing Perspectives profiled El Paso-based Cinco Puntos Press, which publishes books by Benjamin Alire Saenz and Joe Hayes.
• The San Antonio Express-News covered a celebration by Tony Diaz’s Librotraficantes that stopped an anti-ethnic studies bill in the Texas Legislature this spring.
• Some news about Carlos Fuentes: The FBI had a dossier on the Mexican novelist, reports the Los Angeles Times, and his books are now available on e-readers, according to Publishers Weekly.
• Sandra Cisneros discussed Latinos in entertainment and other topics on NBC Latino’s Cafecito.
• Alex Espinoza, author of The Five Acts of Diego Leon, talked to the LA Review of Books.
• NPR profiled children’s singer and author Jose Luis Orozco.
One of the greatest Latin American writers of all time, Gabriel García Márquez has won the most prestigious award in literature — the Nobel Prize. He is a pioneer of magic realism and the leader in the Latin American boom of the 1960s. His novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera frequently pop up on lists of the best books ever written.
Poet and novelist Alvaro Mutis is a winner of the Cervantes Prize, given to Spanish language writers, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His books and poetry regularly feature the character of Maqroll el Gaviero as he goes through different journeys – whether it’s a trip along a river or caught up s in a war. His poetry often touch on themes of nature.
Winners of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, one of Latin American literature’s most prestigious awards, include Gárcia Márquez; Manuel Mejía Vallejo (1923-1998), right, for La casa de las dos palmas; Fernando Vallejo for El desbarrancadero; and William Ospina for El País de la Canela.
Jaime Manrique, a native of Barranquilla, has written numerous novels about South America, including Our Lives are the Rivers and Colombian Gold: A Novel of Power and Corruption, as well as books of poetry.
Two writers cover the lives of modern day women of Colombian heritage —Patricia Engel, left, whose parents are Colombian and grew up in New Jersey, is the author of Vida and It’s Not Love It’s Just Paris, and Leila Cobo, who grew up in the Colombian town of Cali, is the author of Tell Me Something True and The Second Time We Met.
The Hispanic Reader 