THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
Oscar Hijuelos: The Mambo Kings and Other Novels
Oscar Hijuelos: The Mambo Kings and Other Novels
A legendary Cuban-American storyteller enters the Library of America series with a volume gathering three seductive and profound novels about family, desire, music, and loss
Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) is one of the most acclaimed Latino writers of the last half century. Here are three classic novels that opened a window on the Cuban-American experience, announcing a major new voice in our literature.
Hijuelos launched his career with Our House in the Last World (1983), a resonant and nuanced novel portraying one immigrant’s family story in midcentury Manhattan. At its center is Hector Santino, whose family has left the “home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi Arnaz” to settle in New York City, where their ebullient expectations of the good life in America lead, inevitably, to myriad disappointments and adjustments.
In his best-known novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)—a book that Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he would have liked to have written—Hijuelos offers an unforgettable tribute to Latin music and its place in American culture around the middle of the twentieth century. Earning Hijuelos the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded a Latino novelist, The Mambo Kings is also about the fleeting nature of fame and celebrity as well as the more profound themes of love, desire, and family.
The poignant Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995), which Hijuelos once noted was an attempt to write a Christmas story “without being corny,” takes up themes of loss and redemption in a story that poses the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.