A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son
Foreword Review INDIES Multicultural Award, Silver
30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books for Fall, Kirkus Reviews
15 Great New Books for Hispanic Heritage Month, NBC News
A collection of short stories where Mexican-Americans grapple with their roots as their ambitions take them far from home.
How does a Mexican-American, the son of immigrants, a child of the border, la frontera, leave home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? With echoes of Dreiser's American Tragedy and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds which ultimately seem so empty.
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Sergio Troncoso was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. His previous works include A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, From this Wicked Patch of Dust, and The Last Tortilla. He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, immigrants, families and fatherhood, and crossing cultural, religious, and psychological borders. Among the numerous awards he has won are the International Latino Book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories, the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, Southwest Book Award, Bronze Award for Essays from ForeWord Reviews, and the Silver and Bronze Awards for Multicultural Fiction from ForeWord Reviews.
Troncoso has taught fiction and nonfiction at the Yale Writers' Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut for many years. He has served as a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the New Letters Literary Awards in the Essay category. His work has recently appeared in New Letters, Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Texas Monthly, and New Guard Literary Review.
The son of Mexican immigrants, Troncoso grew up on the east side of El Paso in rural Ysleta. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received two graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy from Yale University. A Fulbright scholar, Troncoso was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Alumni Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL). He currently serves as TIL President.
Sergio Troncoso is one of our most brilliant minds in Latina/o Literature. These new stories demonstrate that he is also possessed of a great corazón. This is a world-class collection. Troncoso continues to raise the bar for the rest of us. Highly recommended. -- Luis Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
Troncoso's sharp-edged stories speak to the difficult lives of those who, as he writes, are born behind in a race they must run all the same. -- Kirkus Reviews, 30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books for Fall
Our bodies are legacies that encompass landscapes, borders, ancestors, histories that bind us to the past. Here are stories lodged in the geography of polarities and the taut tightrope act between. -- Sandra Cisneros author of The House on Mango Street
In his thought-provoking collection of stories, Sergio Troncoso introduces us to a wide cast of characters, each unique and particular in his or her own way, and yet ever so universal in terms of the human experience. Troncoso's stories are timely and relevant; only with knowledge can one beat back the bear of a colonial past. -- Christina Chiu, author of Troublemaker and Other Stories
I love Sergio Troncoso's new collection...This book is a triumph, the work of a master writer at the peak of his game. -- W. K. Stratton, author of The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, A Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Movie
A collection of stories about told from the perspective of a Mexican-American man born to poor parents and making his way through the elite institutions of America. Luis Alberto Urrea calls the book 'a world-class collection.' -- The Millions
[A]n outstanding collection of connected short stories uniquely reflecting life along the troubled Texas-Mexico border. -- Michelle Newby Lancaster, Lone Star Literary Life, Best of Texas 2019
Sergio Troncoso tells skillfully nuanced stories from the perspective of a poor immigrants' son who has found success within the world of America's elite universities and financial power, yet still feels adrift and alienated and seeks deeper meanings. -- Si Dunn, Lone Star Literary Life
These poignant short stories shed a startling light on the middle-class experience of Chicanos in New York...Sergio Troncoso dispels the myth of assimilation as a safe haven and reminds readers that distance from a working-class upbringing doesn't absolve a person from the responsibility to one's community. -- NBC News, 15 Great Books for Hispanic Heritage Month
Chicano literature began with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when a sizable Latino population was separated from its land and heritage. Sergio Troncoso has written brilliantly of this disruption and its pull. -- Alta Magazine
An inherently fascinating and compelling read from first page to last, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son is an extraordinary and deftly written collection and one that is especially and unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library Hispanic American Literature & Fiction collections. -- Midwest Book Review
[Troncoso's] most powerful work yet, and an essential addition to the Latinx canon. -- Daniel Peña, Texas Observer
Although many stories take place far from the Rio Grande, this is a robust, proud exploration of what it is like to be (on what one character calls) 'the edge of the edge of the United States': to be the child of immigrants, to be straddling two worlds-lines between love and sex, past and future, civilization and brutality, life and death. -- Greg Walklin, Literal Magazine
Foreword Review INDIES Multicultural Award, Silver
30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books for Fall, Kirkus Reviews
15 Great New Books for Hispanic Heritage Month, NBC News
Best Collection of Short Stories, International Latino Book Awards
Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, Texas Institute of Letters
Best Books of 2019, Lone Star Literary Life
Reading the West Award Nominee
