Joseph Viek, Bardo99's protagonist awakens to learn there has been an accident. But what kind of accident? The massive coronary that ends his own life, or a much more dread accident, the kind we associate with places like Chernobyl? On his way to the disaster zone, a road accident strands him in a deserted tundra. Rescued by an unholy trinity of American GIs, more adventures await him: quarantine in a cancer ward -- or is it an AIDS ward? -- a resurrection of the dead from all of post-modernist catastrophes: my lai, babi yar, kigali, and 'no-gun' ri. And why is it that everything he touches seems to have the uncanny misfortune of blowing up? Cecile Pineda has crafted a divine comedy where the sacred keeps uneasy truce with the profane--back cover.

Since the 1980s, a prolific "second wave" of Chicano/a writers and artists has tremendously expanded the range of genres and subject matter in Chicano/a literature and art. Building on the pioneering work of their predecessors, whose artistic creations were often tied to political activism and the civil rights struggle, today's Chicano/a writers and artists feel free to focus as much on the aesthetic quality of their work as on its social content. They use novels, short stories, poetry, drama, documentary films, and comic books to shape the raw materials of life into art objects that cause us to participate empathetically in an increasingly complex Chicano/a identity and experience. This book presents far-ranging interviews with twenty-one "second wave" Chicano/a poets, fiction writers, dramatists, documentary filmmakers, and playwrights. Some are mainstream, widely recognized creators, while others work from the margins because of their sexual orientations or their controversial positions. Frederick Luis Aldama draws out the artists and authors on both the aesthetic and the sociopolitical concerns that animate their work. Their conversations delve into such areas as how the artists' or writers' life experiences have molded their work, why they choose to work in certain genres and how they have transformed them, what it means to be Chicano/a in today's pluralistic society, and how Chicano/a identity influences and is influenced by contact with ethnic and racial identities from around the world.

This poetic narrative discusses the creative life of a 9th century Indian stonecarver who is drafted at an early age to spend his entire life working on the thousands of statues that fill the niches of an Indonesian temple. Exploring the muse–artist relationship as few works of fiction have done, this novel is an intensely political work—a parable that pits the blind cruelty of a feudal ruler against the creative expression of a single slave.

When a Brazilian man's face is disfigured, he attempts a grisly self-surgery in this novel of survival.

Told in the voice of a lone holdout standing guard on an unnamed frontier, Redoubt addresses questions of conception and birth, gender, war and the slouch toward Apocalypse. Structured like a series of jazz riffs, its thematic underpinnings are drawn in part from the dictionary definitions that introduce each section--back cover.

This hilarious novel is a feminist spoof on the mostly-male magical realists of the "Boom" generation.

Told in the voice of a five-year-old girl who sees more than she understands, this novel chronicles her passage through sickness, the separation of her parents, and a maze of secret lives, all with the richness of her budding imagination.

Devoted to literature produced by writers of Mexican descent born in the United States, living here permanently, or having lived in the territory which until 1848 was part of Mexico.

There has been a dramatic increase in the amount of narrative work published by Chicana and Latina authors in the past 5 to 10 years. Nonetheless, there has been little attempt to catalog this material. This reference provides convenient access to all forms of narrative written by Chicana and Latina authors from the early 1940s through 2002. In doing so, it helps users locate these works and surveys the growth of this vast body of literature. The volume cites more than 2,750 short stories, novels, novel excerpts, and autobiographies written by some 600 Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Nuyorican women authors. These citations are grouped in five indexes: an author/title index, title/author index, anthology index, novel index, and autobiography index. Short annotations are provided for the anthologies, novels, and autobiographies. Thus the user who knows the title of a work can discover the author, the other works the author has written, and the anthologies in which the author's shorter pieces have been reprinted, along with information about particular works.

As much personal journal as investigative journalism, this account traces the worsening developments at Fukushima Daiichi during the first year following the nuclear disaster. Often poetic in tone and philosophic in scope, this day-to-day reportage is peppered with the author's reflections and dramatic monologues as she investigates the public's willing blindness toward the nuclear power industry's disregard for public safety in the pursuit of profit. The book offers a unique perspective and attempts to come to terms with Fukushima's catastrophic consequences on the planet.