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| photo: Emilia Galavis | |
Alejandro Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of 26, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, the American Scholar, and elsewhere, and his story "Hands of Dirty Children" was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2020. He lives with his wife, the writer Brittani Sonnenberg, and daughter in Austin, Tex. Freedom Is a Feast (Little Brown, August 20, 2024), his debut novel, is a multigenerational, Latin American saga of love and revolution.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A young idealist in 1964 chooses revolution over family, a decision that will haunt them all for 50 years of troubled Venezuelan history.
On your nightstand now:
I always have a stack. An old copy of El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) by Gabriel García Márquez, which I literally open to random pages every once in a while. One or two pages at a time is enough to get lost in the language and also all that I can take. Gabino Iglesias's House of Bone and Rain. I usually don't read thrillers, but I've been wanting to read Gabino's work for a while and am loving his unflinching look at Puerto Rico's underbelly, all while Hurricane Maria rages in the background. Althea by Sally H. Jacobs is the biography of tennis champion and African American athlete pioneer Althea Gibson. I'm obsessed with tennis, so when I saw this at the Austin Public Library, I immediately snatched it. Finally, a beat-up copy of Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw that my brother gave me. He asked me to read the profile Bourdain did on Justo Thomas, the Dominican fish butcher at Le Bernardin, at the heights of the restaurant's popularity. It is a masterclass in writing about a job, and every writer should read it.
Favorite book when you were a child:
J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles are up there, but I would be lying if I said anything other than the hundreds of X-Men comic books I devoured since I picked one up at the age of 12.
Your top five authors:
Jesmyn Ward. Talk about exploration of place and character. There's so much tenderness in her work, even in the darkest moments.
Amy Hempel, like García Márquez for me, offers a refuge based almost entirely on language and its musicality.
Isabel Allende, for her heart. Reading The House of the Spirits and then jumping straight into her memoir, Paula, is a great way to fall in love with her writing.
James Baldwin, for all the reasons.
Some recency bias here, but Justin Torres has earned a top spot for me in just two books. Blackouts is a gem of a novel, both for its content and as an object in itself, and the perfect follow-up to We the Animals.
Book you've faked reading:
Oh, God. Moby-Dick. I'm sure it's the masterpiece everyone says it is, but I can't be bothered.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Not that it needs another evangelist, but Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Sabrina & Corina. What a masterpiece. Such a tight collection, all bangers.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The first book I ever bought when I moved to the U.S. in 2006, Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More than You. Bright yellow with black type. It took me on a weird ride that I still think about every now and then.
Book you hid from your parents:
I don't think I ever did! I do remember feeling weird when I read V.C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic as a kid.
Book that changed your life:
Julio Cortázar's collected short stories Los Relatos. One story in particular, "La autopista del sur," was the piece that made me say "maybe I can write something" and put pencil to paper for the first time to try something of my own.
Favorite line from a book:
The final line of Amy Hempel's short story "Weekend," from her collection Tumble Home: "And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay."
Five books you'll never part with:
My Folio Society copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, gorgeously illustrated by Neil Packer.
Julio Cortázar and Alberto Cedrón's graphic novel La raíz del ombú. Only a few copies of the first printing survive in the world, after a fire at the Venezuelan printer that made them.
My dedicated copy of Hempel's Reasons to Live.
A copy of the children's poem Margarita by Rubén Darío that I've started reading to my baby daughter.
Finally, my wife, Brittani Sonnenberg, gave me her debut novel, Home Leave, a couple of weeks after we started dating. It made me fall in love with her and with her amazing work.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
When I first read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I was working a job I didn't like, bored out of my mind, in a forgotten corner of a dark office. I was so immersed. I felt everything: fear, horror, love. While it's not one of my favorite books, and I'm not usually drawn to post-apocalyptic stuff, it made me feel intensely, and that's one of my favorite things about a good book.