Remembering to Say Mouth or Face - Softcover

Castaneda, Omar S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932511813 ISBN 13: 9780932511812

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2006

Synopsis

In this award-winning collection of short stories, Guatemalan American Omar S. Castañeda uses a unique and richly textured mixture of magic realism and "attack dog fiction" to explore the wrenching conflicts of biculturality. The stories inRemembering to Say 'Mouth' or 'Face' depict the troubled and often darkly humorous lives of people struggling against the slow tectonics of violence. The collection opens in the United States, where drugs and self-annihilating rage overwhelm one of Castañeda's most sharply drawn and subtly sarcastic narrators. In other stories characters in search of their Mayan roots inhabit both real and mythical Central American landscapes.

The characters in these stories know both Americas but find a home in neither. They confront violence and vanquish, at least for themselves, those deep ills caused by living with racism. Buffeted by cultural conflicts and animated by the desire to construct a new language of cultural translations, they embark on spiritual journeys that ultimately enable them to recover and transform Guatemalan traditions.

About this title

Review

"In the stories of Omar Castaneda, we cross borders with a surefooted guide: the rivers of immigrants on a pilgrimage, the jungles of ancient myth, the hard urban landscapes of sleeping addicts and sleepless lovers. Guatemala haunts and invigorates these tales like Castaneda's Lord of Festival, dead but not dead, the face of magic and ritual and danger illuminated in flashes of poetic language." Martin Espada, author of City of Coughing and Dead Radiators"

About the Author

Born in Guatemala of ladino parents, Omar. S. Castaneda moved to the United States at age three and grew up in the Midwest, where he was naturalized at age eleven. He teaches at Western Washtington University, where he directs The Hubless Wheel, a reading series that features minority and ethnic writers. Castaneda is the author of Cunuman, Among the Volcanoes, and Abuela's Weave; and he coedited New Visions: Fiction by Florida Writers."

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0932511813
• ISBN 13: 9780932511812
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 156