September is jam-packed with amazing releases and we’re excited to get our read on. There’s a title for everyone looking to celebrate Latine Heritage Month, here are the books we’re most looking forward to picking up. Check out the full list of titles out this month!
The Patron Saint of White Menageries: Stories by Lauren T Davila | FICTION
In a sticky diner, a waitress fits wisps of cloud into coffee mugs, trying to solve her patrons' problems. A motherless girl defies her father's rules, rubbing fish scales from her eyes and learning her mother's half-remembered Spanish. Spectral ballerinas haunt alleys and dance studios, and red bumps rise on the arms of an assistant whose employer has been alive too long. The prophet Cassandra, exhausted from reincarnating and never being believed, tries one last time to escape her fate.
For lovers of White Cat, Black Dog and whoever haunts the Pacific Coast Highway, The Patron Saint of White Menageries is a guide to magical LA by one of its native daughters.
The Singing Tamales Present: 'Tis the Season for Tamales! by Andrea Campos | CHILDREN’S
Tis the season for tamales! Led by a singing, strumming, drumming band of tamales, young readers are invited to join in the fun holiday tradition of making tamales while singing along to the tune of, "Deck the Halls." From New York Times bestselling illustrator of Con Pollo, this adorable bilingual book is a delightful introduction to tamales, togetherness, and the joy of food. Qué rico!
La Bandera: Poems of Resistance and Pride by Anika Aldamuy Denise | Illustrated by Ericka Lugo | CHILDREN’S
The missing piece of history you are about to read begins with a brave woman, a swath of fabric, and a spool of thread.
Puerto Rico’s complex and deep history is woven throughout each thread of its flag. A symbol of opposition to occupation and injustice, la bandera represents the great pride of a people and its diaspora. With lyrical poetry and vibrant art, the deeply layered origins of the Puerto Rican flag are stitched together in this poignant reflection on the island’s history from the 19th century to the present day.
Includes 14 poems. Further historical context about Puerto Rico and an author's note is included in the backmatter.
Bodega Stories by Amaris Castillo | FICTION
A bodega is much more than a neighborhood grocery store--it's a lifeline to community and culture. In Bodega Stories, Amaris Castillo takes readers inside Orlando Latin Market, a bodega owned and operated by her parents in St. Petersburg, Florida, to reveal a thriving local hub that bridges generations, languages, and traditions.
Meet the regulars: Castillo's glamorous Tía Margarita, who has worked part-time at the bodega for years; longtime cook Alberto, who arrives early to prepare the store's rice, beans, empanadas, and croquetas; Chico, the owner of the barbershop next door; and Esther, who visits after church every Sunday for her crispy chicharrones. Through captivating and charming true stories of visitors who come looking for products from Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, and many other countries, readers get a glimpse into the lives of employees and customers as they navigate matters of immigration, love, history, food, and identity.
Interwoven are snapshots of daily life, like a bulletin board outside the store where local residents post apartments for rent, messages through the bodega's Facebook page asking for hard-to-find items, and photos from the past and present. Including Castillo's own family's story from the Dominican Republic to New York to Florida, Bodega Stories is a portrait of finding home--between the cultures we inherit and the ones we embrace.
Bury Your Dead by Ana Paula Maia | Translated by Padma Viswanathan | FICTION
Edgar Wilson has a gruesome job, one he is entirely unsentimental about--he cleans up roadkill in rural Brazil. But one day vultures are circling in the woods, and he can't not go see what they're gathering for. What transpires is a quest--a miserable day-long journey--for a couple of poor working men who only want to acknowledge that everybody (and in this case, every literal body) has the right to be treated as more than just scrap or trash.
Dead animals, defrocked priests, corpses abandoned in the woods, and a criminal outfit trafficking in body parts--Bury Your Dead is an exhortation, a road trip, a story of friendship, and a hymn to the small ways we can shape the world. Ana Paula Maia's alchemy with the grimmest of ingredients makes this her more hopeful, generous novel yet.
East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood by Guadalupe Rosales | BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
Guadalupe Rosales chronicles her Boyle Heights childhood and adolescence in East LA, finding joy and danger from Commerce Center to Whittier Boulevard. Her frank, intimate prose captures the freedom and fear pulsing through that time and how sisterhood helped her survive it.
After losing loved ones to violence and struggling with drugs and depression, Rosales moved across the country to New York City. A stack of starshots from her youth became a lifeline and eventually inspired her to create two Instagram archives while she was away from home: Veteranas and Rucas celebrates ’90s LA women, while Map Pointz focuses on the party crew scene. Thanks to her, they’re thriving online communities.
Now this beloved artist—whose work hangs in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and elsewhere—extends her project of collective memory by sharing her own story of adolescence in a treacherous time, finding herself as an artist far from home, coming to terms with her own queerness, and returning to her beloved Los Angeles transformed. Elegantly designed, the text is interspersed with photography, flyers, Rosales’s own artwork, and social media conversations.
An altar to a past era and a map to the future, this book is a reminder that memory, celebration, and community make us whole.
Cemetery Boys: Espíritu by Aiden Thomas | YOUNG ADULT
Julian used to be a ghost and now he can’t stop seeing them.
Ever since Julian was sacrificed as part of a forbidden ritual, he has been able to see and talk with spirits. And that’s really cool, since it allows him to be part of his new boyfriend's community. But Julian’s seeing other things, too: flickers at the edge of his vision, eyes burning in the night, and “dark spots” on people—gaping wounds that thrum and bleed shadow. Yadriel has never heard of anything like it, either, and he’s so busy with his new brujx responsibilities that Julian hates for his problems to ruin what little time they have together.
Then a strange new brujx shows up. Angel, as a nonbinary bruje, can heal the living and release the dead, but more than that, they can also see the same dark spots as Julian. Despite Yadriel’s reservations, Julian eagerly accepts their help. But, Angel’s ruthless methods feel wrong to Julian.
With the shadows growing darker and the discovery of a gaping dark spot on his friend Luca, Julian has to decide who he wants to put his trust in, and just how far he’s willing to go to save what is his.
Silencio by Clyo Mendoza | Translated by Christina MacSweeney | FICTION
Silencio tells the story of Águeda, a young woman mourning the death of her mother. When the townspeople deny her a grave in the local cemetery, the mother’s body vanishes. Águeda knows her father is hiding it, and when she confronts him, he punishes her defiance with confinement.
Serving her sentence in a house, Águeda lives within those walls as if in a second maternal womb—one that will transform her. In chapters alternating between the real and the imaginary, she mourns the destroyed futures of those who were silenced as she listens to her neighbors’ stories of loss—a child worker; a boy from the Tacuate community; and Mexican refugees in Canada. Through the walls, she senses the world: birds in dialogue, the beauty of the arid landscape, experiences of love and devastation. She comes to realize that in this mountain region that resembles the author’s hometown of Oaxaca, where organized crime holds sway, many—like her—mourn their dead and search for the disappeared.
In her second book to be translated into English, Clyo Mendoza transcends the limits of language and realism to represent with lyric brutality the unspeakable violence in towns where narcotrafficking rules.
Terrestrial by Cristina Rivera Garza | Translated by Christina MacSweeney | NONFICTION
In this new collection of genre-defying stories by Cristina Rivera Garza, a woman visits what she thinks could be her old lover's hometown after being abandoned by her, years earlier. Two herons hitchhike across Mexico. A group of workers build a new home, only to see it destroyed by the state.
With little baggage and much bravado, the characters in Terrestrial hitchhike, migrate, take trains, wander or, at times, fly, to survive the mandates of patriarchy and capitalism. On dusty roads or by a lake turned suddenly ominous, they remain in close contact with the earth's surface, sensing its wild promise and capacity for violence, its degradation and enduring beauty.
As she did in her Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Rivera Garza forges new forms, experimenting with structure and time as she tails the intrepid travelers with shimmering and honest prose. Combining journalism, novelistic writing, and themes of female freedom, gore capitalism, and class struggle, Terrestrial is a meditation on travel and distance, and our ties to the earth we tread on.
The Twelve Loves of Christmas: An Advent Romance Collection | Contributions by Alexandria Bellefleur, Elise Bryant, Olivia Dade, Alexis Daria, Sarah Hogle, Zakiya N. Jamal, Rebecca Jenshak, Jessica Joyce, Susan Lee, Joss Richard | FICTION
The Twelve Loves of Christmas is a swoon-worthy short story collection about finding love during the most magical time of the year. Including a playful forced proximity romance featuring a woman and her older brother’s grinchy (yet unexpectedly endearing) best friend, a tender love story of two neighbors who decide to skip Christmas together, a second-chance spark reignited between exes stranded at the airport, and many more festive love stories, there’s a little holiday magic waiting for every reader.
Open one sealed story each day in the lead-up to Christmas to unwrap a season full of love, warmth, and happily-ever-afters.
Second Generation Blues: A Graphic Novel by Julio Anta | Illustrated by Red Dryer | CHILDREN’S
Luis Menendez wants to be free from his immigrant Cuban-American parents’ expectations. Instead, he’s spending the summer delivering food for his family's faltering restaurant, sweating under the hot sun and the crushing weight of a future he didn’t choose.
At least there’s Yara. Confident, assertive, and basically Luis’s dream girl, she might be the only person who understands him. If only he had any free time to spend with her.
Amid the chaos, Luis starts carving out his own path. But when trying to be the son his parents need clashes with the life he wants, he’s forced to face the question he’s most afraid of answering: Is family loyalty worth sacrificing his own happiness?
