New Titles For The Fall

Almost time for the new books for fall - it's good news when the new books start rolling from the presses. Here are a few, many more to come:

Ana Castillo has two new works, both published by small presses. Here’s what the Wings Press website says about the play, Psst...I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor:
"Sister Dianna Ortiz traveled as a missionary in the early 1980s to the highlands of Guatemala, where she taught Mayan children to read and write. On November 2, 1989, Sister Dianna was sitting in the garden of her convent when she heard a man behind her say, in Spanish, Hello, my love. We have some things to discuss. She was abducted by this man, who together with others transported her to a jail where she was brutally tortured. One of her torturers ––their boss, in fact –– was a North American, probably associated with the US government in some capacity. Miraculously, Sister Dianna escaped by leaping from a car in which she was being transported.
...
Ana Castillo, moved beyond grief and anger, wrote these plays to document Sister Dianna's story."

Her second book comes from Curbstone Press. The book is a verse novel, Watercolor Women, Opaque Men. The press blurb for this book says, "With a remarkable combination of tenderness, lyricism, wicked humor, and biting satire, Ana Castillo dramatizes her heroine’s struggle through poverty. Urged on by the gods of the ancients, the heroine, known only as Ella or She, narrates stories that illustrate what it means to be a marginalized brown woman or man at the threshold of the 21st Century."

Wings Press also is publishing a book of new poetry (after fourteen years) from Lorna Dee Cervantes, Drive: The First Quartet. The book is set for shipping in October, 2005.

Martin Limón returns after several years’ with a new book about his Chicano military cops in Korea, George Sueno and Ernie Bascom, entitled The Door to Bitterness. Limon has created a unique and exciting series (this is the fourth book about George and Ernie.) So it’s real encouraging to hear about this new one. "What lingers longest in George and Ernie’s odyssey is the grinding poverty, pride and moral compromise they find in1974 Korea ... [and] acrid insights on the dehumanizing force of the lasting American presence in Korea." (Kirkus)