Family, history, and love fire this spirited new novel from award-winning author Kathleen Alcal. Just before 1900, Estela moves with her infant son from a small village to Mexico City, in part to flee her past, in part to be near her lovera society doctor, who she discovers is now married. Estela finds herself swept up into the beginnings of the country's feminist movementwith its unlikely center a wealthy woman who sets up a school for prostitutes and an all-women orchestra. Estela's son, Noe, grows up in this world to become a dissident journalist enmeshed in his own dangerous liaisons. Incorporating characters from Alcal's previous novels but standing complete on its own, Treasures in Heaven weaves a rich and eventful tapestry of people and ideas.
Kathleen Alcalá's life is all about stories. She is the author of four works of fiction - Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist; Spirits of the Ordinary; The Flower in the Skull; and Treasures in Heaven - and a collection of essays. Her work is the recipient of a Governor's Writers Award, the Washington State Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and a Western States Book Award, among others. Kathleen teaches Creative Writing in the Low Residency MFA program at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island. Two of her stories are included in the recent Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. More at www.kathleenalcala.com.
"I began writing as a way to explain the world to myself. So much family history did not match the 'official' history of the Southwest, that I had to become an explorer, an adventurer, an ethnographer, a scholar and a writer in order to discover who we were and who we are today. I believe that writing, in and of itself, is a political act, and that the artistic cannot be separated from the political. Writing makes the invisible, visible; the silent, audible; the absent, present."
Quotes:
This is a book of wonders. Each story unfolds with humor and simplicity and perfect naturalness into something original and totally unpredictable. Not one tale is like another, yet all together they form a beautiful whole, a world where one would like to stay forever. The kingdoms of Borges and Garcia Marquez lie just over the horizon, but this landscape of desert towns and dreaming hearts, of lost sisters and ghost scientists, canary singers and road readers, is Alcalá-land. It lies across the border between the living and the dead, across all the borders - a true new world.
- Ursula K. LeGuin on Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist
Kathleen Alcalá captures the essence of the magical realism in her work. Her stories convincingly move the reader from one reality to the other. Kathleen's craft illuminates the souls of her characters: the Mexican women who carry the universe in their hearts.
- Rudolfo Anaya
