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Carolina De Robertis’s Favorite Books by Latinx Authors

Carolina De Robertis’s Favorite Books by Latinx Authors

In honor of Latinx Heritage Month, we are delighted to share this recommended reading list of Latinx authors from our very own Carolina De Robertis, author of the groundbreaking, genre-defining novel Cantoras. Carolina’s list spans genres, from memoir to searing and powerful novels, while each work connects us to the intricate and priceless human soul. Enjoy diving into one (or more!) of these books as we celebrate the voices and achievement of Latinx authors.

Dominicana, Angie Cruz

This gripping, moving novel chronicles the life of a teenage girl who emigrates to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant in the 1960s, and as the bride of a man twice her age. Inspired by the life of the author’s mother and told in beautiful prose, Dominicana sears the heart, awakens the mind, and opens worlds.

Ordinary Girls, Jaquira Díaz

This exquisitely crafted memoir transports the reader to Díaz’s youth in both Puerto Rico and Miami, where the impact of poverty and violence is rendered in sentences so luminous they almost glow on the page. An explosively powerful love song to survival, and to the beauty and resilience of Black and brown girls.

The Iliac Crest, Cristina Rivera Garza

This surreal novel opens when a mysterious woman arrives at the narrator’s home and sets in motion events that will have him questioning everything, from his gender to reality itself. Set in a place akin to the U.S.–Mexico border, this innovative portrait of the cost of erasing women from life and histories has a way of slinking beneath the skin and haunting the reader long after the final page.

Fiebre Tropical, Juli Delgado Lopera

This gorgeous novel beautifully reveals the world of Francisca, a fifteen-year-old Colombian immigrant caught between her own nascent queer desires and a mother swept up in an evangelical church. Voiced in an English richly colored by Spanish, this book blazes a radiant path and is a thrill to read.

Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera

This stunning, slim, arresting novel of border crossing between the U.S. and Mexico at once expands and subverts what we think we know about migrants, placing the journey in the realms of both allegory and adventure. At once spare and philosophical, playful and profound, this account of one young woman’s quest speaks to the deeper reaches of the soul.

 

Carolina De Robertis, a writer of Uruguayan origins, is the author of The Gods of Tango, Perla, and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain. Her novels have been translated into seventeen languages and have garnered a Stonewall Book Award, Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, and numerous other honors. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is also a translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times. In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis to its 100 List of “people, organizations, and movements that are shaping the future of culture.” She teaches at San Francisco State University and lives in Oakland, California, with her wife and two children. www.carolinaderobertis.com