Bøger af Oscar Hijuelos

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author comes a “masterpiece” about a composer returning to his beloved homeland after WWII (Kirkus, starred review). The year is 1947. Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life once revolved around music and love, is finally returning home. En route to Habana, Cuba from Spain, he is a shadow of his former self, disillusioned after he was mistakenly sent to a camp during the Nazi occupation of France. In Habana, he escapes his anguish by reminiscing about his happiest moments before the war, when he lived a life of pleasure and excitement—and had a loving, if unrequited romance with Rita Valladares, the alluring singer who inspired Levis’s most famous composition, “Rosas Puras.” A tender homage to music, art, and a vibrant country at the edge of modernity, A Simple Habana Melody is a virtuoso performance from one of America’s most talented writers.Includes a reading group guide.

Hailed “the deepest and the best” of a Pulitzer-Prize winning author's novels, a business man struggles to restore his faith after his son is killed (New York Times Book Review). In 1960s New York, Edward Ives is a picture of the American dream. Adopted as a child by a widowed print shop manager who helped him cultivate a love of drawing, he now has a successful career as an illustrator in advertising, a beautiful home with his wife and muse, Annie, and two loving children. But this idyllic life is brutally wrenched away when Ives’s 17-year-old son, Robert is murdered in a crime of opportunity that proves to be as random as it is senseless.  Consumed by grief, Ives withdraws from the world. Grappling with a loss of faith—a force that has guided him steadfastly since childhood—he starts to question every aspect of human existence, contemplating what it really means to live an emotionally and spiritually fulfilling life. This mourning consumes him—until faces his son's killer.Mr. Ives' Christmas is a tender, passionate story of a man working to rediscover what it means to love and forgive after unspeakable tragedy. It is another tremendous achievement from one of America’s most talented writers. Includes a Reading Group Guide.

"Irish American Nelson O'Brien fell passionately in love with the poetess Mariela Montez while photographing the ravages of battle in Mariela's native Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After marrying, they moved to the United States to start a new life, settling in a small Pennsylvania town where Nelson took over the Jewel Box Movie Theater. Together, they had a remarkable fifteen children: fourteen daughters and one lone son. In Oscar Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, the lives, loves, and tragedies of this sprawling Irish Cuban family unfold. Over the course of a century, each member moves in and out of each other's lives, traversing Cuba, New York, California, Alaska, and Ireland, while Margarita--the Montez O'Brien's eldest daughter--ruminates on the nature of femininity, sex, love, and earthly happiness. And as Margarita learns and grows in an overwhelmingly female environment, she can't help but contrast her experiences with those of Emilio, her intensely masculine brother, whose B-movie career in the 1950s has left him adrift and frustrated, with little hope of success."--Publisher description.

A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in the debut––and most autobiographical––novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Winner of the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award and the Rome Prize Hector Santinio is the younger son of Alejo and Mercedes, who moved to New York from Cuba in the mid-1940s. The family of four shares their modest apartment with extended relatives in Harlem, where homesickness and nostalgia are dispelled by nights of dancing and raucous parties. But life’s realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family’s adoptive land. When Mercedes takes Hector and his brother to visit Cuba, to better know her culture, Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to a terrifying period of hospitalization back in the United States where, isolated from his family, he loses much of his ability to speak Spanish. And it is this fracturing that sparks a lifelong quest to not only reconcile his Cuban identity with his American one, but to also understand his parents’ ambitions and anxieties within the country at large. In this profoundly moving account of immigrant life, Oscar Hijuelos displays, once again, his mastery over both character and language—and sets readers on an unforgettable journey of hope, longing, and self-discovery.Includes a Reading Group Guide.

"In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Marâia is the great Cuban beauty who stole musician Nestor Castillo's heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings' biggest hit, 'Beautiful Marâia of My Soul.' Now in her sixties, Marâia Garcâia y Cifuentes is the lady behind the song, living as an exile in Miami. But while she left Cuba decades ago, she has never forgotten Nestor. We now see the Mambo Kings' story through Marâia's eyes--and as she thinks back to her days and nights in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the story unfolds. We meet her as an illiterate young woman with unspeakable, head-turning beauty who meets and falls in love with Nestor in Havana, but ultimately chooses to stay involved with a cruel, wealthy lover. When the Cuban Revolution intervenes, Marâia and her daughter seek refuge in Miami. And as she finds community with other Cuban women and begins to take lessons at a local college, Marâia finally goes from muse to the writer of her own story."--

It's 1949, the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become, by night, stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings.

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos, is a luminous work of fiction inspired by the real-life, 37-year friendship between two towering figures of the late nineteenth century, famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos, who worked on the project for more than ten years, publishing other novels along the way but always returning to Twain and Stanley; indeed, he was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013. The resulting novel is a richly woven tapestry of people and events that is unique among the author's works, both in theme and structure. Hijuelos ingeniously blends correspondence, memoir, and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long vanished world. From their early days as journalists in the American West, to their admiration and support of each other's writing, their mutual hatred of slavery, their social life together in the dazzling literary circles of the period, and even a mysterious journey to Cuba to search for Stanley's adoptive father, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise superbly channels two vibrant but very different figures. It is also a study of Twain's complex bond with Mrs. Stanley, the bohemian portrait artist Dorothy Tennant, who introduces Twain and his wife to the world of sv©ances and mediums after the tragic death of their daughter. A compelling and deeply felt historical fantasia that utilizes the full range of Hijuelos' gifts, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise stands as an unforgettable coda to a brilliant writing career.

A legendary Cuban-American storyteller enters the Library of America series with a volume gathering three seductive and profound novels about family, desire, music, and lossOscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) is one of the most acclaimed Latino writers of the last half century. Here are three classic novels that opened a window on the Cuban-American experience, announcing a major new voice in our literature. Hijuelos launched his career with Our House in the Last World (1983), a resonant and nuanced novel portraying one immigrant's family story in midcentury Manhattan. At its center is Hector Santino, whose family has left the "home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi Arnaz" to settle in New York City, where their ebullient expectations of the good life in America lead, inevitably, to myriad disappointments and adjustments. In his best-known novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)-a book that Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he would have liked to have written-Hijuelos offers an unforgettable tribute to Latin music and its place in American culture around the middle of the twentieth century. Earning Hijuelos the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded a Latino novelist, The Mambo Kings is also about the fleeting nature of fame and celebrity as well as the more profound themes of love, desire, and family. The poignant Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995), which Hijuelos once noted was an attempt to write a Christmas story "without being corny," takes up themes of loss and redemption in a story that poses the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people. This Library of America edition marks the entrance of Hijuelos into the series with a deluxe hardcover edition that includes as well a newly researched chronology of the author's life.

Oscar Hijuelos vividly brings to life the joys, desires, and disappointment of American life witnessed through the experience of a formerly prosperous Cuban émigré named Lydia Espana--now a cleaning woman in New York. In magnetic prose, he juxtaposes Lydia's tale with the stories of her clients, contrasting her experiences with the secret lives of those for whom she works. No one writes better of love or the pulse of a city, nor has any writer better captured the complexity inherent in the emigration experience; how assimilation is at once the achievement of dreams, yet also a loss of the past. Empress of the Splendid Season is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a novel filled with incantatory, rhythmic prose and rich in heartfelt vision.

From FSG Classics, a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Oscar Hijuelos's beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to the grand stage of New York City. It is the era of mambo, and the Castillo brothers, workers by day, become stars of the dance halls by night, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth, exuberance, love, and freedom-a golden time that decades later is remembered with nostalgia and deep affection.Hijuelos's marvelous portrait of the Castillo brothers, their families, their fellow musicians and lovers, their triumphs and tragedies, re-creates the sights and sounds of an era in music and an unsung moment in American life.Exuberantly celebrated from the moment it was published in 1989, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990 (making Hijuelos the first Hispanic recipient of the award). It was adapted for a major motion picture in 1992 (The Mambo Kings) and remains a perennial bestseller. The story's themes of cultural fusion and identity are as relevant today as they were twenty-five years ago, proving Hijuelos's novel to be a genuine and timeless classic.

The impeccably researched final novel from Oscar Hijuelos, acclaimed author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

In 1949, two young Cuban musicians, brothers Cesar and Nestor, leave Havana for New York. By day they work hard, by night they are the Mambo Kings: packing out clubs, dance halls and theatres with their sensuous, pulsing Latin music. This is the story of Cesar and Nestor and their changing fortunes as they try to make it big in America.

Tells the story of Mr Ives, who was adopted from a foundling home as a child.