Synopses & Reviews
In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic.
Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.
The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite.” A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.
Winner, Best Latino Focused Fiction Book, International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now
Finalist, Best Historical Fiction Novel, International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now
Review
An extraordinary portrait of one of the most critical periods in Mexicos history. Nava breathes life into the stories of political, cultural, and social revolutionaries as they navigate change in their country and within themselves. This is a breakthrough novel.”Rigoberto González, author of
Autobiography of My Hungers Review
City of Palaces begins as the love story of two good people, a Catholic and an atheist, who find each other in the corrupt world of belle epoch Mexico City. It grows into a magnificent epic about family, politics, art, revolution, and hope. This is a masterly work of old-fashioned storytelling, rich and spacious and moving, a novel that deserves to be compared to
The Leopard,
Love in the Time of Cholera, and
Doctor Zhivago, but with its own intimacy and grandeur. I fell in love with these people and did not want to say goodbye to them.”Christopher Bram, author of
Exiles in AmericaReview
"An unforgettable portrait of the artist as a young immigrant gay poet. These brief, passionate chapters are filled with rare courage, raw honesty, and the uncommon beauty of a life spent yearning for consolation and hope. Absolutely arresting."—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire
Review
"A haunting book, whose many senses linger long after reading it."—Mary Cappello, author of Awkward: A Detour
Review
“This beautiful, unconventional memoir, infused with poetic language, places González firmly in the top tier of American writers. Not only aficionados of memoir, poetry, and Latin American and gay literature but also general audiences will enjoy these stories and poems.”—
Library JournalReview
“A slim volume of candid vignettes that illuminate an artist’s blossoming against a backdrop of brutal poverty and emotional tumult.”—
OutReview
“Rigoberto González’s trim yet artistically potent
Autobiography of My Hungers combines poetry, musings, memories, pleasures, pains, and most importantly, yearnings that have made him the exacting artist he has become today. . . . González’s self-analysis by means of mixed media is stimulating, enlightening, and well worth the journey.”—
Bay Area ReporterReview
“Immigrant and gay readers may experience release in the book’s agonizing familiarity; all readers will find it lusciously evocative.”—
Publishers WeeklyReview
“González brings a deep, soul-crushing sadness to the pages, which gives the book gravitas that belies its length.”—
Washington BladeReview
“This first novel in the author’s ‘Children of Eve’ series begins to untangle a tight knot of political and historical intrigue surrounding the Mexican Revolution.”—
Stanford Review
“González writes with deep, soul-crushing sadness. He pens with the beauty of a poet.”—
Dallas Voice Synopsis
This collection of poems by Betsy Sholl offers revelations by weaving together seemingly unrelated events.
Synopsis
A sweeping novel of Mexico set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution,
The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.
Synopsis
Rigoberto González, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger. The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body—all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes. Each vignette is a defining moment of self-awareness, every moment an important step in a lifelong journey toward clarity, knowledge, and the nourishment that comes in various forms—even "the smallest biggest joys" help piece together a complex portrait of a gay man of color who at last defines himself by what he learns, not by what he yearns for.
About the Author
Rigoberto González is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose and the editor of
Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. His memoir
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa won the American Book Award, and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a contributing editor for
Poets & Writers Magazine, serves on the executive board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and is an associate professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
“Told in a series of revealing vignettes and poems, González’s Autobiography of my Hungers turns moments of need and want into revelations of truth and self-awareness, creating the portrait of an artist that is complex if not entirely complete.”—El Paso Times
“Through his provocative vignettes, González communicates a lifetime of struggle for affirmation and self-acceptance.”—Make/Shift
Table of Contents
acknowledgments allegory I. Leaving the Motherland, Mother Leaving Meduty
piedritapotatozacapu
piedritajugetetrashliftwitch
piedritafirex-mascrayonnote icrooked
piedritabiologywickeddream
piedritaglovemigra II. Unsettled Independenceinvisible
piedritatongueinsomnianote iinightshiftxóchitl
piedritavoicereprimand martini III. In Search of Paradisestation
piedritakilloutcasteyekiteclown
piedritatetherpapigodiva
piedrita IV. Body Cravingsloveempty
piedritasketchrainchi
piedritaghostspseudonym
piedritaquestionsnote iii
piedritahaughtyextractionbleedvoracious
piedritaforest