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Author's Books Please buy the novel and contribute to Edgar's Sushi Fund. Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak
What does it say about America when a middle-class young woman dissatisfied with her mixed ethnicity decides to convert to being Puerto Rican? That is exactly what red-headed Rebecca Lynn Horowitz does. A pregnancy prevention social worker to Latina teens, living a fairly sedate life in the middle class neighborhood of Brooklyn's Park Slope, our heroine undergoes a transformation such as you've never read. At a party in the summer of 2000 she meets Charlie Maisonet, a Puerto Rican dandy, and her biological clock starts ticking twice as fast. Through the twists and turns of her romance with Charlie, she moves to his pad in the East Village, becomes Zoraida Delgado, a Puerto Rican exotic dancer, and begins living la vida loca. Join the author as he once again explores the environs of this pseudo-bohemian Manhattan playground, bends the rules of novel writing and satirizes the memoir, sexual politics, gender roles, and the pretense of our society. He even throws in his own photos of some of the places in the East Village that the characters frequent, including Katz Delicatessen, The Sunshine Theater, Two Boots and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Are they really his photos or are they Zoraida's, a photography and film enthusiast? Oh, the novel also addresses the issue of the Iraq War in a most ingenuous way. From The Overlook Press in 2008. Read an excerpt below.  Naughtiness on the subway at 3 AM? Can you believe these people? Read on, blush or reach for your honey.  From Booklist Vega Yunqué's ribald and rambling style reverberates throughout his third novel, the saga of a "gringo whiteboy" trying to make it big in New York City. Along the way, Vega Yunqué deftly skewers the politics of academia, the "tyranny of mediocrity" in contemporary American literature, and America's ongoing prejudice against Puerto Ricans. A raunchy, in-your-face vehicle for Vega Yunque's many causes, and he, unlike the formulaic novels he disparages, definitely has a lot to say. Deborah Donovan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow... is an inventive, high spirited novel...And, of course, I like his politics.” --Alasdair Gray, author of Lanark and The Book of Prefaces “Vega Yunqué has written a remarkable novel tracing the life of a young bruja (witch), Maruquita Salsipuedes, and her love relationship with a white punk rocker, Omaha Bigelow. Part Piri Thomas, part Gabriel García Márquez, and part J.D. Salinger, this picaresque tale forces us to think about, and laugh at, the absurdity of our various cultural stereotypes.” --New York Post “Vega Yunqué ... has a keen intelligence, an ear for dialogue and a flair for zany passages of magic realism.” --Publishers Weekly Published October 2004, The Overlook Press.  Winner of the 2004 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. “This sprawling, iconoclastic, ambitious, stunningly written novel that is part picaresque, part Bildungsroman and part recapitulation of America’s last half-century...belongs on the shelf with its epic siblings: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” --Washington Post Book World (cover review) “An exceptional epic shaped by the jagged rhythms of jazz...you’ll be humming Bill Bailey long after the music stops.” --People Magazine (critic’s choice) Hardcover: Published October 2003, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Paperback: Published October 2004, Picador.  Zinsbegoochelende literaire roman die staat als een huis.   --Voice Literary Supplement Published Spring 1991, Arte Público Press, U. of Houston.  "Mendoza's Dreams...shows us, in 12 funny and personality-laden tales, that there is indeed much more to life in Spanish Harlem than gang warfare; set to the strains of Bernstein and Sondheim." --San Francisco Chronicle Published Spring 1987 by Arte Público Press, U. of Houston.  In his novel The Comeback (1985), [Vega Yunqué's] satirical idea, that Puerto Ricans can be anywhere and anybody, which may, after all, not be so far from the truth, is pushed to the extreme. --Professor Wolfgang Binder, U. of Erlangen, Germany, "Hispanic Voice of Satire: Ed Vega's Portrait of the Puerto Rican Community," published in Voix et Langages aux Etats-Unis, Actes du Colloque des 20, 21 et 22 Mars 1992, Publications de L'Université de Provence. Published Spring 1985, Arte Público Press, U. of Houston.  |
Some other books and anthologies in which Vega Yunqué's work appears.
 A Whistler in the Night World, Colchie, Thomas, ed. “Eight Morenos,” a short story, Penguin Plume, 2002.  Criss-Cross Tales: Short Stories from English Speaking Cultures, “The Kite,” a short story, Studentlitteratur, Lund, Sweden, 2002.  Growing up Puerto Rican, ed. Joy de Jesus, Foreword by Ed Vega, a short story, "Spanish Roulette," William Morrow, New York, 1997.  Under the Pomegranate Tree, ed. Ray Gonzalez, "Home Movies," a chapter from Dhread, a novel, Washington Square Press, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Shuster Inc., New York, 1996.  Spanish Harlem: Photographs by Joseph Rodriguez with an essay by Edgardo Vega Yunqué. Smithsonian Institution, 1994.  Currents from the Dancing River, ed. Ray Gonzalez, "The Last Dream," a short story, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1994.  Iguana Dreams, eds. Delia Poey & Virgil Suarez, "The Clocks, Ribbons, Mountain Lakes and Clouds of Jennifer Marginat Feliciano," a novella, Harper-Collins, New York, 1992.  Reading Literature and Writing Argument, Prentice Hall, 2002  The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature, Prentice Hall, 2001.  Growing up Latino, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.  Hispanic Writers of the United States, Arte Público Press, 1984 |
