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Runner-up, Best Popular Fiction in English, Latino Book Awards Competition, 2010

The golondrina is a small and undistinguished swallow. But in Spanish, the word has evoked a thousand poems and songs dedicated to the migrant's departure and hoped-for return. As such, the migrant becomes like the swallow, a dream-seeker whose real home is nowhere, everywhere, and especially in the heart of the person left behind.

The swallow in this story is Amada García, a young Mexican woman in a brutal marriage, who makes a heart-wrenching decision—to leave her young daughter behind in Mexico as she escapes to el Norte searching for love, which she believes must reside in the country of freedom. However, she falls in love with the man who brings her to the Texas border, and the memories of those three passionate days forever sustain and define her journey in Texas. She meets and marries Lázaro Mistral, who is on his own journey—to reclaim the land his family lost after the U.S.-Mexican War. Their opposing narratives about love and war become the legacy of their first-born daughter, Lucero, who must reconcile their stories into her struggle to find "home," as her mother, Amada, finally discovers the country where love beats its infinite wings.

Bárbara Renaud González, a native-born Tejana and acclaimed journalist, has written a lyrical story of land, love, and loss, bringing us the first novel of a working-class Tejano family set in the cruelest beauty of the Texas panhandle. Her story exposes the brutality, tragedy, and hope of her homeland and helps to fill a dearth of scholarly and literary works on Mexican and Mexican American women in post–World War II Texas.

These stories represent an intermediate stage in the evolution of the Knight brothers in Ralph McInerny’s fiction. In The Noonday Devil, Phil, in his capacity as private detective, was fairly close to the action, but by no means the major character. Roger, his blimp-sized brother, entered obliquely into the story but ended by starring in the finale.
     Readers liked them, in particular Roger. So McInerny brought them back in Easeful Death, where they are far more central and Roger occupies much space, physically and narratively. And so it might have remained. When McInerny was asked to do a Notre Dame series of mysteries, he decided to bring Roger to South Bend as the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, accompanied by the semi-retired Phil, who has the full menu of Notre Dame sports to keep him occupied. Prior to starting the series, McInerny wanted to reacquaint himself with the Knights and hit upon the idea of doing a series of Knight brothers stories in Crisis, a magazine he founded with Michael Novak. Before moving them to South Bend, he wanted to see them in action, working out of New York, always driving in the specially designed van, never flying, to the cities were their client lived. 
     Good Knights is the result of putting these eight Knights brothers’ stories together. Call them finger exercises in character. The response to them in the magazine was gratifying, and with them behind him, McInerny launched the Notre Dame series, with On This Rockne in 1996, thirteen years and thirteen novels ago. But the origins of that successful series is seen here.

Good for the Jews is a smart, funny, sexy novel set in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Bush administration. Part mystery and part stranger-comes-to town story, Good for the Jews is loosely based on the biblical book of Esther. Like Esther, Debra Spark's characters deal with anti-Semitism and the way that powerful men—and the women who love them—negotiate bureaucracies.

At the core of the story of right and wrong are young, attractive Ellen Hirschorn and her older cousin Mose, a high school teacher who thinks he knows, in fact, what is "good for the Jews"—and for Ellen, too. Their stories intertwine with those of the school superintendent, his ex-wife and son, and a new principal. Workplace treachery, the bonds of family, coming of age, and romantic relationships all take center stage as the characters negotiate the fallout from a puzzling fire.

Spark's evocative writing style and sharp, understanding treatment of her diverse characters draw the reader into this surprising page-turner, a finalist for the 2009 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award.

This distinctive collection introduces a new type of mythmaking, daring in its marriage of fairy tale tropes with American mundanities. Conspiratorial, Goodbye, Flicker describes the interior life of a girl whose prince is a deadbeat dad and whose escape into a fantasy world is also an escape into language, beauty, and the surreal.

Griever de Hocus, accompanied by his rooster, Matteo Ricci, plays havoc with the monolithic institutions of the People’s Republic of China in Vizenor’s inspired retelling of the classic Chinese Journey to the West. Fiction.

Griever de Hocus, accomopanied by his rooster, Matteo Ricci, plays havoc with the monolithic institutions of the People's Republic of China in Vizenor's inspired retelling of the classic Chinese Journey to the West.

After papá’s arrest in 1980, Daniel’s family fled to the United States. Now Daniel has a new life, playing guitar in a rock band and dating Courtney, a minister’s daughter. He hopes to become a US citizen as soon as he turns eighteen.

When Daniel’s father is released and rejoins his family, they see what five years of prison and torture have done to him. Marcelo is partially paralyzed, haunted by nightmares, and bitter about being exiled to “Gringolandia.” Daniel worries that Courtney’s scheme to start a bilingual human rights newspaper will rake up papá’s past and drive him further into alcohol abuse and self-destruction. Daniel dreams of a real father-son relationship, but he may have to give up everything simply to save his papá’s life.

This powerful coming-of-age story portrays an immigrant teen’s struggle to reach his tortured father and find his place in the world.