Luis is Avid's operations manager and started bookselling on a fateful day in June 2018. He enjoys literary fiction, poetry, and has dabbled in historical nonfiction, memoir, essay, science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels. Needless to say, he loves a good genre-bender! In his free time he also draws and plays video games, usually while covered in cats. He was a judge for the 2022 Kirkus Prize in Fiction.
A tiny monster of a book that blends porse and poetry with classical studies to tell a story of unrequited desire and the struggle toward self-acceptance. For those who have ever felt out of place or ugly. (You're not!) Also, make sure to check out Carson's Red Doc>, the chimeric sequel to this modern classic
In these essays Chee explores what it means to be a queer, half-Korean writer in America--what it means to be an individual. Reading this collection reminded me to not lose sight of the things that make me unique in the face of fortune and sorrow.
The House on Mango Street is not the saccharine juvenilia you might assume it is, in fact it's a precise distillation of a certain time and certain place, one that captures the rhythms of Spanish, the vibrant energy of youth, and an emotional depth that will resonate with anyone. After looking into each of the windows on Mango Street, what I left with was a sense of belonging, a greater understanding of my place in the world.
A mesmerizing, symphonic masterwork of literature, music, history, the American roadside, the news, David Bowie, and our fragile yet unassailable humanity. Luiselli's sharp wit and architectural writing puts together a sheathing criticism of America and a portrait of a family facing the borders between them. I loved this book and its unexpectedly funny and tender moments! Highly recommended for Anne Carson fans.
An epic of convergences, rifts, and revolution. I am obsessed with these books and how intricately they capture the lasting effects of systematic oppression while also telling a gripping story of survival and love. Utterly fantastic!
Hop into the sink hole and cross through the mirror with this dizzying journey across the border. Haunting and captivating. Herrera's writing is striking as it shifts from alien and detached, to visceral and intimate all while packing a dizzying wallop!
The finely crafted sentences in these stories elegantly implements living, breathing syntax to weave pleasure and politic, ecstasy and rumination. Sensual scenes that made me need to occasionally take a pause to fan myself, to take a moment, as if I had been caught unawares. It's fucking beautiful.
Prepare to get your soul scrubbed down and wrung out. This novel from Quebec captures a world that will be familiar to folks in the service and music industry. Vividly painted scenes from the trenches of a barely-functional kitchen during a rush followed by dizzying late-night get togethers make up this portrait of the loneliness of late-capitalism and the strength we can find from art and our allies. Gritty, loud, and compassionate.
In trying to define what draws her to lighthouses, Barrera ekes out to the edge of her obsession by exploring the literary and historical significance of beacons. For the lonely, for the collectors, for the wandering, this book is a treasure and a fantastic gift for readers. While you won’t find a clear answer in the fog to head toward, you’ll instead find permission, an allowance to treasure the quiet moments thinking about what you find impossibly captivating.
It would be an injustice to describe it any other way: The Undocumented Americans is a paradigm shifting masterwork of journalism and compassion. Instead of the alienating and oftentimes exploitative gaze of many books covering immigration into America, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes with such a clarifying vibrancy and unrelenting honesty that not only documents the lived experience of undocumented but gets at the heart of the failures of America to welcome the sick, the poor, the hungry but it does it in a way that aims to challenge those who are unfamiliar with the struggle while also inviting you to open your eyes to see what’s at stake are human lives. It’s some of the best writing I’ve ever read in any genre.
This is the queer, subversive Western I’ve been looking for! It reaches into the myth of the frontier and romanticization of colonialism in the Americas and pulls out a scandalous, hallucinatory, sexy, and beautiful story of liberation. At times a queer sentimental education, at others a throbbing pastoral, and often a romp with surprises around every corner. A bold translation that does justice to China Iron's grace and bravado.
Disarming in its tenderness, Ocean Vuong's depiction of family, queer love, illness, and this nation is undeniably a masterwork of artful writing and human compassion. I was floored by how generous and full of gratitude this novel was.