No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again

Yunque, Edgardo Vega

ISBN 10: 0374223114 / ISBN 13: 9780374223113

Published by Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2003

About this Item

8vo, 638 pp.

Seller Inventory # 070649

Bibliographic Details

• Title: No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374223114
• ISBN 13: 9780374223113
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy in fine dust jacket
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

An epic novel of jazz, race and the effects of war on an American family

This sweeping drama of intimately connected families --black, white, and Latino-- boldly conjures up the ever-shifting cultural mosaic that is America. At its heart is Vidamía Farrell, half Puerto Rican, half Irish, who sets out in search of the father she has never known. Her journey takes her from her affluent home to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her father Billy Farrell now lives with his second family. Once a gifted jazz pianist, Billy lost two fingers in the Vietnam War and has since shut himself off from jazz.

In this powerful modern odyssey, Vidamía struggles to bring her father back to the world of jazz. Her quest gives her a new understanding of family, particularly through her half-sisters Fawn, a lonely young poet plagued with a secret, and Cookie, a sassy, streetsmart homegirl who happens to be "white." And when Vidamía becomes involved with a young African-American jazz saxophonist, she is forced to explore her own complex roots, along with the dizzying contradictions of race etched in the American psyche.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué vividly captures the myriad voices of our American idiom like a virtuoso spinning out a series of expanding riffs, by turns lyrical, deadly, flippant, witty, and haunting.

About the Author

Edgardo Vega Yunqué, author of The Comeback, Mendoza's Dreams, and Casualty Report, was born in Puerto Rico and lives in Brooklyn. His stories have been adapted for the stage and anthologized internationally.