The Accidental Santera

The Accidental Santera
Author: Irete Lazo
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429947888

A one-of-a-kind novel that plunges readers into the secrets of Afro-Cuban Santeria—a world of fascinating beauty, pulsating rhythms, and great mystery. Gabrielle Segovia, Ph.D., is struggling to build a career as a Latina scientist, cope with her third miscarriage, and resuscitate her marriage to fellow biology professor Benito Cruz. Becoming a santera is not in her plans. But everything changes when her best friend, the feisty Patricia Muñoz, drags her into a French Quarter voodoo shop during a conference in New Orleans. When Gabrielle gets home to the San Francisco Bay Area, the predictions from her on-a-whim reading begin to come true. That's when she learns she hails from a long line of practitioners of Santeria, the religion created when Yoruba slaves combined their ancient rituals with Catholicism. Out of desperation to become a mother and save both her job and her marriage, Gabrielle turns to Puerto Rican relatives living in Miami she hasn't seen since she was a child. She finds herself warmly embraced by three generations of Segovia santeras and drawn into their world of séances, sacred drums, and ritual animal sacrifice. Unexpectedly marked for initiation by the gods and goddesses of the Yoruba pantheon, Gabrielle must decide whether she can bring herself to answer the call. And, if she chooses, commit to the seemingly contradictory life of a scientist who is also a santera. In this powerful debut novel, Irete Lazo captures a vibrant world still unknown to many and relates a journey that is at once funny, heart-wrenching, and, ultimately, triumphant.

Across a Hundred Mountains

Across a Hundred Mountains
Author: Reyna Grande
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2007-05-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743269586

Grande puts a human face on the epic story about those who make it across the border into America, those who never make it across, and those who are left behind.

The Yoruba Domino Oracle

The Yoruba Domino Oracle
Author: Carlos G. y Poenna
Publisher: Weiser Books
Total Pages: 99
Release: 2000-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1609255739

This easy-to-follow guide reveals the simple yet powerful Yoruba tradition of using dominoes for divination. While the game of Dominoes is beloved across the globe, the Yoruba tradition of Africa reveals how the ubiquitous tiles can also be used for divination. Best known in Santeria, the domino oracle is universal and may be consulted by anyone. In The Yoruba Domino Oracle, Carlos G. y Poenna explains how to perform domino readings and interpret each tile as well as their combinations. For each reading, y Poenna gives instructions for offerings or prayers to reader’s chosen spirits, whether they be Yoruba deities or Catholic saints.

The Bar Cart Bible

The Bar Cart Bible
Author: Adams Media
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1507201168

"Provides everything you need to know to stock your home bar and make classic cocktails, including what equipment to use, ingredients to stock, and recipes for making delicious drinks"--

Bloodprint

Bloodprint
Author: Kitty Sewell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2010-02-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1847379524

Following a devastating tragedy that claimed the life of her husband, Madeleine Frank has fled the Florida Keys for the safe surroundings of Bath. But as a psychotherapist trying to help patients heal after traumatic events, she knows only too well that it's impossible to recover from some losses. Just as she's starting to forget the scars of her past, Madeleine is thrown off-balance by the arrival of a new patient. Sensing something familiar in this damaged and hostile woman, Madeleine is disturbed to discover that strains of her patient's childhood eerily echo her own darkest secret. The increasingly complex relationship between Madeleine and her client, Rachel, will unleash a terrifying series of events which neither could have predicted - and which neither can control. And at the heart of the terror lies the fate of a child.

The New Orleans of Fiction

The New Orleans of Fiction
Author: James A. Kaser
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2014-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810892049

The importance of New Orleans in American culture has made the city's place in the American imagination a crucial topic for literary scholars and cultural historians. While databases of bibliographical information on New Orleans-centered fiction are available, they are of little use to scholars researching works written before the 1980s. In The New Orleans of Fiction: A Research Guide, James A. Kaser provides detailed synopses for more than 500 works of fiction significantly set in New Orleans and published between 1836 and 1980. The synopses include plot summaries, names of major characters, and an indication of physical settings. An appendix provides bibliographical information for works dating from 1981 well into the 21st century, while a biographical section provides basic information about the authors, some of whom are obscure and would be difficult to find in other sources. Written to assist researchers in locating works of fiction for analysis, the plot summaries highlight ways in which the works touch on major aspects of social history and cultural studies (i.e., class, ethnicity, gender, immigrant experience, and race). The book is also a useful reader advisory tool for librarians and readers who want to identify materials for leisure reading, particularly since genre, juvenile, and young adult fiction—as well as literary fiction—are included.

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
Author: Sarah Quesada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2022-08-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009085964

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.

Ashé-Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in the Cuban, Colombian, Costa Rican, and Panamanian Novel of Resistance

Ashé-Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in the Cuban, Colombian, Costa Rican, and Panamanian Novel of Resistance
Author: Thomas Wayne Edison
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498597483

Ashé-Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in the Cuban, Colombian, Costa Rican, and Panamanian Novel of Resistance contributes to understanding the important role that African-influenced spiritualcultures play in literature that challenges the concept that European aesthetics are superior to African-inspired cultures. Thomas W. Edison highlights the novels of four courageous Caribbean writers who have used their novels to integrate aspects of African ontology with literary techniques, themes, and history. The common element in these works is the inclusion of African-inspired faith traditions and culture. As a result of this perspective, their literature stands out as keen examples of Ashé-Caribbean resistance literature. While each writer presents their unique literary style in the works, collectively they draw on a foundation of the Afro-Caribbean. The Circum-Caribbean region will be the geographical unit because of its collective history of slavery, colonial rule, and parallel patterns of religious syncretism. This book makes an important literary connection among Caribbean Hispanophone nations.

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts
Author: Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 772
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004429301

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s. However, the book's goal is not to dig up evidence of the creation of an epistemology of knowledge and its transnational connections. The research on which this book is based suggests that the artefacts created in fieldwork, offices, libraries, laboratories, museums, and other places and experiences – beyond the important fact that these places and situations involved actors other than the anthropologists themselves – have been different things during their troubled existence. The book seeks to make these differences apparent, highlighting rather than concealing the relationships between partial modes of making and being ‘Afro’ as a subject of science. If the artefacts created in a variety of situations have been different things, we should ask what sort of things they were and how the actors involved in their creation sought to make them meaningful. The book foregrounds these discontinuous and ever-changing contours.

Dreaming in Cuban

Dreaming in Cuban
Author: Cristina García
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307798003

“Impressive . . . [Cristina García’s] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the ‘sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,’ as rhythmic as the music of Beny Moré.”—Time Cristina García’s acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a country’s revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is “a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez” (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel’s original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban “Remarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.”—The Washington Post “Brilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, García just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”—The Denver Post