Lupita Aquino invites you to join her new book club\, La Comunidad Reads\, an author-inclusive club that aims to bui ld a space where Latine-authored books are magnified for all readers!
\ nFor this meeting of the La Comunidad Reads Book Club\, poet and writer John Manuel Ar ias joins Lupita to talk about his debut novel\, \;Where There Was Fire. They will discuss the intergenerational impacts of Machism o + Maranismo roles within the Latinx community through the queer Latinx l ens\, how it emphasizes the role of women as family and home-centered\, en couraging passivity\, self-sacrifice and chastity. They will also delve in to the current stat eof magical realism in literature\, the impact of U.S. agribusiness in Latin American and much more. \;
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John M
anuel Arias \;is a queer\, Costa Rican American poet and writer. He is
a Canto Mundo fellow &\; alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Works
hop. His prose and poetry have been published in \;PANK\, The Rumpus\,
F(r)iction\, Joyland Magazine\, \;and Akashic Books. He has lived in
Washington D.C.\, Brooklyn New York\, and in San José\;\, Costa Rica
with his grandmother and four ghosts. \;Where There Was Fire \;is
his first novel.
A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family w restling with a deadly secret\, from rising literary star John Manuel Aria s
\nCosta Rica\, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fru it Company's most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a ma ssive cover-up\, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde's family is changed forever.
\nNow\, twenty-seven years later\, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa \, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful n ight. Teresa\, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mo ther\, Amarga\, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story o f a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand\ , and the mystery at the heart of one family's rupture\, steeped in machis mo\, jealousy\, labor uprisings\, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantati ons in Central America.
\nBrimming with ancestral spirits\, omens\, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature\, John Manuel Arias weaves a bril liant tapestry of love\, loss\, secrets\, and redemption in Where Ther e was Fire.
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La Comunidad Reads with Lupita Aquino is generously s
upported by the DC Public Library Foundation.