A novel on a plucky flamenco dancer in Chicago. It follows her from her rise to fame despite a crippled leg from polio, to her descent as the polio returns, her two lovers abandon her and she is reduced to working in a sweatshop. But Carmen will recoup.

"A delightful novel...impossible to resist." —Barbara Kingsolver, Los Angeles Times Book Review Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion--which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany--reveals Grass at his most intimate.

From American Book Award-winning author Ana Castillo comes a suspenseful, moving novel about a sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent woman. Eking out a living as a teacher’s aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tía Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo’s father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst. After several days of waiting and with an ominous phone call from a woman who may be connected to a smuggling ring, Regina and Gabo resolve to find Rafa. Help arrives in the form of Miguel, an amorous, recently divorced history teacher; Miguel’s gregarious abuelo Milton; a couple of Gabo’s gangbanger classmates; and a priest of wayward faith. Though their journey is rife with challenges and danger, it will serve as a remarkable testament to family bonds, cultural pride, and the human experience Praise for The Guardians NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE “An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache–that draw the reader in.” –Chicago Sunday Sun-Times “A rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking . . . This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience.” –Los Angeles Times “What drives the novel is its chorus of characters, all, in their own way, witnesses and guardian angels. In the end, Castillo’s unmistakable voice–earthy, impassioned, weaving a ‘hybrid vocabulary for a hybrid people’–is the book’s greatest revelation.” –Time Out New York “A wonderful novel . . . Castillo’s most important accomplishment in The Guardians is to give a unique literary voice to questions about what makes up a ‘family.’ ” –El Paso Times “A moving book that is both intimate and epic in its narrative.” –Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

An honest, unsentimental story of pain and change and love. A powerful novel about a girl re-making her life after a car accident. For teenagers and young adults.

An Anchor Books Original Cherished for her passionate fiction and exuberant essays, the author hailed by Julia Alvarez as "una storyteller de primera," and by Barbara Kingsolver in The Los Angeles Times as "impossible to resist," returns to her first love—poetry—to reveal an unwavering commitment to social justice, and a fervent embrace of the sensual world. With the poems in I Ask the Impossible, Castillo celebrates the strength that "is a woman?buried deep in [her] heart." Whether memorializing real-life heroines who have risked their lives for humanity, spinning a lighthearted tale for her young son, or penning odes to mortals, gods, goddesses, Castillo's poems are eloquent and rich with insight. She shares over twelve years of poetic inspiration, from her days as a writer who "once wrote poems in a basement with no heat," through the tenderness of motherhood and bitterness of loss, to the strength of love itself, which can "make the impossible a simple act." Radiant with keen perception, wit, and urgency, sometimes erotic, often funny, this inspiring collection sounds the unmistakable voice of a "woman on fire" and "more worthy than stone."

A New York Times Notable Book • "A complex, engaging novel...Sapogonia will establish Castillo as one of our finest Chicana novelists." --Rudolfo Anaya The author of So Far From God, Ana Castillo confronts the complex issues of race and identity facing those of mixed heritage through the struggles of Máximo Madrigal, an expatriate of Sapogonia, the metaphorical homeleand of all mestizos. Subtly political, it demonstrates how warring blood within a single body resists any peaceful resolution.