Hombrecito (Spanish Edition) - Paperback

by Santiago Jose Sanchez (Author)

Una novela escrita por una voz nueva y extraordinaria.

Finalista del Premio Young Lions Fiction de la Biblioteca Pública de Nueva York.

Uno de los mejores libros del año según NPR y Kirkus Reviews

Hombrecito es una historia queer sobre las complejidades de entrar en la adultez. Con una innovadora narrativa, Santiago Jose Sanchez nos adentra en la vida de un niño que, junto a su madre y su hermano, emigra de Colombia a Estados Unidos, dejando atrás a un padre ausente.

En Estados Unidos, su madre --antes médico-- debe trabajar como camarera. El niño, en cambio, acepta su nuevo hogar con el mismo entusiasmo con que acepta su identidad. Sin embargo, a medida que crece, los recuerdos del país y del padre que dejó, se hacen cada vez más presentes, mientras que la relación con su madre se vuelve dolorosa y tensa: un amor impetuoso en torno al cual giran sus decisiones. Entre ellas, irse a vivir a Nueva York. Siendo ya un joven, regresará a Colombia a pasar una breve temporada; un viaje que significará la reconciliación con su tierra natal, con su padre y con la persona que ahora es su madre. Sobre todo, será la clave para una reconciliación con todos los matices de su propia a identidad.

Hombrecito es un retrato conmovedor sobre vivir entre culturas, sobre el descubrimiento y la aceptación de uno mismo. Contada con una belleza y una intensidad sorprendentes, esta historia es para cualquiera que busque sus raíces y una manera distinta de amar.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

FINALIST FOR THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant's complex relationships with his mother and his motherland

In this groundbreaking novel, Santiago Jose Sanchez plunges us into the heart of one boy's life. His mother takes him and his brother from Colombia to America, leaving their absent father behind but essentially disappearing herself once they get to Miami.

In America, his mother works as a waitress when she was once a doctor. The boy embraces his queer identity as wholeheartedly as he embraces his new home, but not without a sense of loss. As he grows, his relationship with his mother becomes fraught, tangled, a love so intense that it borders on vivid pain but is also the axis around which his every decision revolves. She may have once forgotten him, disappeared, but she is always on his mind.

He moves to New York, ducking in and out of bed with different men as he seeks out something, someone, to make him whole again. When his mother invites him to visit family in Colombia with her, he returns to the country as a young man, trying to find peace with his father, with his homeland, with who he's become since he left, and with who his mother is: finally we come to know her and her secrets, her complex ambivalence and fierce love.

Hombrecito--"little man"--is a moving portrait of a young person between cultures, between different ideas of himself. From an extraordinary new talent, this is a story told with startling beauty and intensity, a story for anyone searching for home, searching for a way to love.

Author Biography

Santiago Jose Sanchez (they/them), Grinnell College Assistant Professor of English and graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is a queer, Colombian American writer. Santiago's writing has appeared in McSweeney's, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, Joyland, and been distinguished in Best American Short Stories. They are the recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship from the University of Iowa and an Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellowship from Lambda Literary. Residence: Grinnell, Iowa Hometown: Miami, Florida