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This collection of stories slices through Hispanic life in the city to reveal a richness and a diversity of experience.

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Library Journal Review

In his second collection of stories, Vega details the consuming struggles and sorrows of Puerto Ricans in New York, where reasons for anger and despair accumulate like garbage in the back lots of tenements. A troubled mother, desperate to feed her large family, disguises dog food behind the labels from cans of fish. An unbalanced husband makes a grisly sacrifice in the spirit of revenge. Haunted by memory, cousins and sons cope with internal demons, external hardships, and what one character calls ``the stigma of being an immigrant's child.'' Vega's narrators are rarely sentimental, but their stories betray a deep concern and love for people living precariously between two worlds. A fine, provocative addition for Latino and large general fiction collections.-- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Family relations, particularly those between fathers and sons, are what this collection of tough and well-crafted stories is about--slices of life in the Puerto Rican communities of New York. Vega's male protagonists, often trapped in a violent world, display a tenderness and sensitivity at odds with the macho image prevalent in troubled streets of drug trafficking and gang wars. They mourn for the deaths of their loved ones, be they father, son, brother, or cousin. In "Ebony Tower," Lou Torres struggles with his fragile identity and self-image--son of a white mother and a black father. "Fishing" concerns a poignant relationship between Billy Ballester and his fisherman father, who is seldom home. "What will you be when you grow up, Bill?" his father asks, then answers for his son, "A sailor, or tailor, or a failure not. There's nothing worse than a man content." ~--Theresa Ducato

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Author Edgardo Vega Yunqué was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico in 1936. He moved to New York with his family in 1949 and joined the Air Force after finishing high school. He attended Santa Monica College and New York University. His first short story, Wild Horses, was published in Nuestro magazine in 1977 and his first novel, The Comeback, was published in 1985. Throughout his lifetime, he wrote over 15 novels and 3 collections of short stories including Mendoza's Dreams, Casuality Report, Blood Fugues, and The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle. He founded the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center and was its director from 1993 to 2000. He died on August 25, 2008 at the age of 72.

(Bowker Author Biography)