Rights Information

Rights licensed for editions published in Italy, Peru, and Serbia.

English-language translation available.

Marketing Information

“Remember that we’re in the U.S.,” Dante Celestino is told when his daughter runs away. Friends and neighbors warn him that in the U.S. it’s not considered so unusual for a fifteen-year-old girl to run away. Dante had counseled his daughter Emmita to date only Spanish-speaking Hispanics. He told her she should never date someone who joins gangs or makes drug deals. But she ignores her father’s advice and—right in the middle of her quinceanera—runs away with a Latino dressed in black who has tattoos and a shaved head, doesn’t speak Spanish, and rides a lowrider motorcycle. But Dante is illegal, making it impossible to report the girl’s disappearance to the police.

And so begins Dante’s odyssey. Accompanied by a lame donkey named Virgilio and the voice of his dead wife, he sets out for Las Vegas, where Emmita’s boyfriend—or abductor, as Dante considers him—supposedly lives.

In a journey filled with the pain of nostalgic flashbacks of small-town life and married bliss in Mexico and the joy of music and song, Dante encounters a series of eccentric characters: Josefino and Mariana, known to radio listeners as the Noble Couple, who change their listeners’ luck in an instant; Juan Pablo, a young man who uses his computer genius to rob a Las Vegas casino so he can pay for his college education; and the Pilgrim, a famous balladeer who has crossed the border via underground tunnels so many times that even years later he smells faintly of dirt and death.

In this bittersweet tour de force, the First and Third Worlds join hands, and Mexican pueblo life and Internet post-modernity dance together in one of the most memorable fables to shed light on issues such as immigration, cultural assimilation, and the future of the United States with its ever-increasing Latino population.

Author Biography

EDUARDO GONZALEZ VIAÑA was born in Chepen, Peru in 1942. He earned a degree in law and continued with graduate studies in literature in Spain and France. His short story “Siete noches en California” received the prestigious Juan Rulfo prize in 1999. He is the author of several collections of short stories, among them, American Dreams (Arte Publico Press, 2005), Los sueños de America (Alfaguara, 2000), Las sombras y las mujeres (Mosca Azul Editores, 1996); and Batalla de Felice en la casa de Palomas (Editorial Losada, 1969), which garnered the Premio Nacional de Fomento a la Literatura. He is the author of four novels and two collections of essays. He teaches at Western Oregon University and writes the Correo de Salem, a web-based collection of journalistic commentaries.