[publisher blurbs]

Black Alley
Mauricio Segura, translated by Dawn Cornelio
Biblioasis, May 2010

In the Côte-des-Neiges area of Montreal, the first stop for many new immigrants, live people of more than 100 nationalities. Marcelo, the sensitive son of Chilean refugees, and Cléo, a shy boy from Haiti, find friendship on the track, winning a major relay race together. Years later, in the same streets, two violent gangs, the Latino Power and the Bad Boys, confront each other, and their leaders must decide whether they will be united by their childhood friendship, or divided by race.... A seminal statement about multicultural societies, this brilliantly constructed, deeply felt novel set off a controversy when it was first published in French. Its appearance in English is a literary event not to be missed.

Mauricio Segura was born in Temuco, Chile in 1969 and immigrated to Quebec with his parents as a child. The author of two novels and a book about French perceptions of Latin America, Segura lives in Montreal, where he is well known as a journalist and commentator on immigrant issues.

Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing
Edited by Ilan Stavans
Library of America, October, 2009

Immigration is the essential American story. From London or Lvov, Bombay or Beijing, Dublin or Dusseldorf, people have come to America to remake themselves, their lives, and their identities. Despite political obstacles, popular indifference, or hostility, they put down roots here, and their social, cultural, and entrepreneurial energies helped forge the open and diverse society we live in. The history of American immigration has often been told by those already here. Becoming Americans tells this epic story from the inside, gathering for the first time over 400 years of writing—from 17th-century Jamestown to contemporary Brooklyn and Los Angeles—by first-generation immigrants about the immigrant experience. In sum, over 80 writers create a vivid, passionate, and revealing firsthand account of the challenges and aspirations that define our dynamic multicultural society.

In nearly 100 selections—poems, stories, novel excerpts, travel pieces, diary entries, memoirs, and letters—Becoming Americans presents the full range of the experience of coming to America: the reasons for departure, the journey itself, the shock and spectacle of first arrival, the passionate ambivalence toward the old country and the old life, and above all the struggle with the complexities of America. Arranged in chronological order by date of arrival, this unprecedented collection presents a history of the United States that is both familiar and surprisingly new, as seen through the fresh eyes and words of newcom

Display Comments Add a Comment