This is a fanciful folk tale that helps explain the beautiful flowers that can be seen in all parts of New Mexico in the summer and fall. Acclaimed author and teacher Rudolfo Anaya blends history in this tale that shows how different cultures can work together peacefully and respect the land we all need.

Widely acclaimed as the founder of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya is one of America’s most compelling and prolific authors. A recipient of a National Humanities Medal and best known for his debut novel, Bless Me, Ultima, his writings span multiple genres, from novels and essays to plays, poems, and children’s stories. Despite his prominence, critical studies of Anaya’s writings have appeared almost solely in journals, and the last book-length collection of essays on his work is now more than twenty-five years old. The Forked Juniper remedies this gap by offering new critical evaluations of Anaya’s ever-evolving artistry. Edited by distinguished Chicano studies scholar Roberto Cantú, The Forked Juniper presents thirteen essays written by U.S., Mexican, and German critics and academics. The essayists employ a range of critical methods in their analyses of such major works as Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert (1996), and the Sonny Baca narrative quartet (1995–2005). Through the lens of cultural studies, the essayists also discuss intriguing themes in Anaya’s writings, such as witchcraft in colonial New Mexico, the reconceptualization of Aztlán, and the aesthetics of the New World Baroque. The volume concludes with an interview with renowned filmmaker David Ellis, who produced the 2014 film Rudolfo Anaya: The Magic of Words. The symbol of the forked juniper tree—venerated as an emblem of healing and peace in some spiritual traditions and a compelling image in Bless Me, Ultima—is open to multiple interpretations. It echoes the manifold meanings the contributors to this volume reveal in Anaya’s boundlessly imaginative literature. The Forked Juniper illuminates both the artistry of Anaya’s writings and the culture, history, and diverse religious traditions of his beloved Nuevo Mexico. It is an essential reference for any reader seeking greater understanding of Anaya’s world-embracing work.

This is the exciting tale of how New Mexico's premier crop came to the Land of Enchantment. The story shows the importance of Native Americans who helped bring chile to New Mexico through a long journey with many dangers. Intertwined in the book is love and romance and the story of the influence of many cultures in New Mexico's history.

Glory Vigil, newly married, unexpectedly pregnant at 41, is nesting in the home she and her husband Joseph have just moved to in Santa Fe, a house that unknown to them is rumored to have a resident ghost. Their adopted daughter Juniper is home from college for Thanksgiving and in love for the very first time, quickly learning how a relationship changes everything. But Juniper has a tiny arrow lodged in her heart, a leftover shard from the day eight years earlier when her sister Casey disappeared-in a time before she'd ever met Glory and Joseph. When a fieldwork course takes Juniper to a pueblo only a few hours away, she finds herself right back in the past she thought she'd finally buried.A love story, a family story, a story of searching and the bond between sisters, Finding Casey is a testament to human resilience.

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is a collection of twenty-two powerful and indispensable essays on Native American life, written by one of America's foremost literary voices. Bold and impassioned, sharp and defiant, Leslie Marmon Silko's essays evoke the spirit and voice of Native Americans. Whether she is exploring the vital importance literature and language play in Native American heritage, illuminating the inseparability of the land and the Native American people, enlivening the ways and wisdom of the old-time people, or exploding in outrage over the government's long-standing, racist treatment of Native Americans, Silko does so with eloquence and power, born from her profound devotion to all that is Native American. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is written with the fire of necessity. Silko's call to be heard is unmistakable—there are stories to remember, injustices to redress, ways of life to preserve. It is a work of major importance, filled with indispensable truths—a work by an author with an original voice and a unique access to both worlds.

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”

With her father away fighting in World War II and her grandfather too sick to create the traditional luminaria, Luz helps create farolitos, little lanterns, for their Christmas celebration instead.

Ambiguous and unsettling, Silko's "Yellow Woman" explores one woman's desires and changes--her need to open herself to a richer sensuality. Walking away from her everyday identity as daughter, wife and mother, she takes possession of transgressive feelings and desires by recognizing them in the stories she has heard, by blurring the boundaries between herself and the Yellow Woman of myth.

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. The WPA Guide to New Mexico certainly shows how this Southwest state earned its nickname the “Colorful State.” The blended influence of Native American, Spanish, and Anglo-American cultures account for the Land of Enchantment’s distinct flavor, thoroughly captured in the guide’s stunning photography as well as in its many essays on art, folklore, and language.