Wednesday, January 19, 2011

New Awards for Cinco Puntos Press Books!

A big congrats goes out to Cinco Puntos writer Benjamin Sáenz!

 YALSA  named Sáenz' raw, poetic novel, Last Night I Sang to the Monster as one of the year's Top Ten Best Fiction Titles for Young Adults. The award comes with good reason— Monster is not your everyday YA novel. 17 year-old Zach awakes in residential rehab, with no memory of how he got there.  This evocative, honest story doesn't pull any punches when it comes to dealing with addiction, abuse and recovery. 



This is a powerful and edifying look into both a tortured psyche and the methods by which it can be healed. —School Library Journal 



Zach is eighteen. He is bright and articulate. He’s also an alcoholic, and he’s is in rehab instead of high school, but he doesn’t remember how he got there. He’s not sure he wants to remember. Something bad must have happened. Something really, really bad. Remembering sucks and being alive—well, what’s up with that?

I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes Happy and on some people’s hearts he writes Sad and on some people’s hearts he writes Crazy on some people’s hearts he writes Genius and on some people’s hearts he writes Angry and on some people’s hearts he writes Winner and on some people’s hearts he writes Loser. It’s all like a game to him. Him. God. And it’s all pretty much random. He takes out his pen and starts writing on our blank hearts. When it came to my turn, he wrote Sad. I don’t like God very much. Apparently he doesn’t like me very much either.


Also, Tim Tingle's story Saltypie: A Choctaw Journey from Darkness into Light has been named a Notable Children's Book. Saltypie is a heartfelt story gleaned from Tim's own growing up, and his family's migration from Oklahoma Choctaw country to Pasadena, Texas. 

Publisher's Weekly called it a "quietly poetic story about dealing with adversity."

Bee stings on the backside! And that was just the beginning. Tim was about to enter a world of the past, with bullying boys and stones and Indian spirits of long ago. But they were real spirits, real stones, and very real memories…

In this powerful family saga, Choctaw author Tim Tingle tells the story of his family’s move from Oklahoma Choctaw country to Pasadena, Texas. Spanning fifty years, Saltypie describes the problems encountered by his Choctaw grandmother—from her orphan days at an Indian boarding school to hardships encountered in her new home on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Tingle says, “Stories of modern Indian families rarely grace the printed page. Long before I began writing, I knew this story must be told.” Seen through the innocent eyes of a young boy, Saltypie is the story of one family’s efforts to honor the past while struggling to gain a foothold in modern America. More than an Indian story, Saltypie is an American story, of hardships shared and the joy of overcoming.


Readings at City Lights Books Tonight!

261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA
Time: 7pm




Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker
Readings by Chris Adrian, Daniel Alarcón, and Yiyun Li
celebrating the release of 20 under 40: Stories from The New Yorker, published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux


Chris Adrian is the author of two novels, Gob's Grief and The Children's Hospital, and a collection of short stories, A Better Angel. FSG will publish his third novel, The Great Night, in May of 2011. He lives in San Francisco where he is a Fellow in Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at UCSF.

Daniel Alarcón is the author of two books of stories, and the novel Lost City Radio, which won the 2009 International Literature Award. He lives in Oakland, California.

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, where between age 12 and 16 she was trained as a mathematics prodigy. In 1996, she came to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in immunology but left the field in 2000 to become a writer. Her books, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, have won Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway award, Guardian First Book Award, and other awards. Her second story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, came out in September 2010. She teaches at University of California, Davis.

Deborah Treisman has been the fiction editor of The New Yorker since 2003, and was deputy fiction editor for five years prior to that.
 

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