Dominoes: and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican - Hardcover

Jack Agüeros

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 188068411X ISBN 13: 9781880684115

Publisher: Curbstone Press, 1995

Synopsis

Dominoes & Other Stories from the Puerto Rican, the long-awaited debut collection of fiction of playwright and poet Jack Agüeros, is a unique window on the untold stories of the lives of Puerto-Rican Americans. 

With a phenomenal richness of detail, Jack Agüeros brings the reality of Puerto Rican experience in New York fully to life. In stories that span the decades of the 1940s through 1990s he recreates the barrio in all its multi-faceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, numbers collectors, tropical fruit vendors and sidewalk games of dominoes, its knife fights and junkies' raps and its succesful stories of craftsmen and entrepeneurs.

These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet experiences, but throughout, Jack Agüeros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion that gloriously affirm quiet moments of grace and triumph in common and ordinary struggles--the real stuff of literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Jack Agüeros (born 1934 in East Harlem) is a community activist, poet, writer, and translator. From 1977 to 1986 was the director of the Museo del Barrio in New York City.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Playwright and children's writer Ag eros offers a memorable portrait gallery of ordinary--though thoroughly individualized- -Puerto Rican New Yorkers; two of these eight well-crafted stories were previously published in Latino journals. Here are some of the expected, common images of Puerto Rican life--the men playing dominoes on the street, the young boy working in the family bodega, the hopeful entrepreneur selling food in the park--but there are more unusual characters, too, such as Vazquez, the horologist seen at work repairing antique clocks in a Greenwich Village shop. In each case, Ag eros provides enough detail (without getting bogged down in minutiae) to capture the flavor and texture of daily life. In the quiet, poignant ``One Sunday Morning,'' a young boy loses first place in his godmother's life when she takes in the daughter left behind by a neighbor's suicide. And in ``Malig; Malig & Sal; Sal,'' a single mother, looking a man who can get her out of the projects, decides to break up with her suddenly impractical lover, Sal; college seems to have affected Sal's brain the wrong way and made him crazy; then, after violence erupts, a neighborhood junkie proves his knowledge of street medicine, keeping his injured friend Sal away from hospitals and the police. For his point of departure, Ag eros often takes a character or situation so familiar as to border on stereotype, but in his hands, these small tales lead the reader to a deeper sense of recognition. Studies of character and community in the realist mode, told with quiet humor, without sensationalism or sentimentality. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Curbstone Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 188068411X
• ISBN 13: 9781880684115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 149