Book of the Month

HOW TO ORDER THE UNIVERSE
Author: María José Ferrada
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 978-1951142308

SUMMARY: For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D’s life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the unusual life they’ve created.

María José Ferrada’s children’s books have been published all over the world. How to Order the Universe has been or is being translated into Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, and German, and is also being published all over the Spanish-speaking world. Ferrada has been awarded numerous prizes, such as the City of Orihuela de Poesía, Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía para Ninos, the Academia Award for the best book published in Chile, and the Santiago Municipal Literature Award, and is a three-time winner of the Chilean Ministry of Culture Award. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Facebook: @MariaJoseFerrada
Twitter: @Tin_House
Publisher Website: https://tinhouse.com/author/maria-jose-ferrada/

Conversations With Book

ART IS EVERYTHING
Author: Yxta Maya Murray
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ASIN: B08W3LMJNQ / ISBN: 0810142929

SUMMARY: In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xochitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda’s grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she’s going to film a groundbreaking autocritical documentary in Mexico.

But then everything starts to fall apart when Xochitl’s biological clock begins beeping, Amanda’s father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.

Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles. Her novels include The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Kidnapped, The King’s Gold: An Old World Novel of Adventure, and The Queen Jade: A Novel. Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has won a Whiting Writer’s Award and an Art Writer’s Grant, and she has been a finalist for the ASME Award in Fiction. Her art criticism can be found in Artforum, ARTnews, Artillery, and other periodicals.

Facebook: @YxtaMurray
Twitter: @murrayyxta
Publisher Website: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/

 

Children’s Book

CAMILA: THE RECORD-BREAKING STAR
Author: Alicia Salazar
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 978-1515883210

SUMMARY: After reading about kid record-breakers, Camila dreams of breaking a record of her own. But which world record should she tackle? No matter what she tries, Camila finds that breaking records is hard. Will she ever become a record-breaking star?

Alicia Salazar is a Mexican American children’s book author who has written for blogs, magazines, and education publishers. She was also once an elementary school teacher and a marine biologist. She currently lives in the suburbs of Houston, TX, but is a city girl at heart. When she is not dreaming up new adventures to experience, she is turning her adventures into stories for kids.

Website: https://alicia-salazar.com/
Facebook: @AliciaSalazar
Twitter: @Albricias123
Publisher Website: https://www.capstonepub.com/author/alicia-salazar