From the author of the highly acclaimed literary novel Carry Me Like Water comes a stunning, dramatic psychological thriller that delivers on every level and reaffirms Luis Arrea's claim that Benjamin Sàenz is "writer with greatness in him." 
 In The House of Forgetting, seven-year-old Gloria Santos is taken by Thomas Blacker from the barrio of El Paso, Texas, to Chicago. There, in the home of the respected writer and academic, Gloria is raised to be refined, educated young woman with an appreciation of literature, music, and fine cooking. For more than twenty years she is confined to Blacker's house and only occasionally allowed in the garden he so meticulously keeps. She becomes, it seems, like his flowers--lovingly tended, but utterly at his mercy. 
 As she reaches adulthood, Gloria grows more and more aware that her situation is in unacceptable, and she finds herself confronting her future and the man who has shaped her past. She struggles to distinguish between love and obsession, between gratitude and obligation, and, ultimately, between betrayal and self-preservation. Naive, frightened, and caught between a world she hates and one she does not know, Gloria must summon all her courage and moral strength or risk losing the life she longs for. 
 In the lyrical prose for which he is known, Benjamin Sàenz offers a haunting psychological drama that examines one woman's search for her identity and explores what it means to have freedom. The House of Forgetting is a riveting tale of abduction, lost innocence, and revenge--a page-turner in the truest sense, a novel that longers in memory, and one that establishes Benjamin Sàenz as one of the most versatile, insightful writers working today.

The House of Forgetting: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Sáenz, Benjamin Alire

United States

Harper

From award-winning poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz comes In Perfect Light, a haunting novel depicting the cruelties of cultural displacement and the resilience of those who are left in its aftermath.
In Perfect Light is the story of two strong-willed people who are forever altered by a single tragedy. After Andés Segovia's parents are killed in a car accident when he is still a young boy, his older brother decides to steal the family away to Juárez, Mexico. That decision, made with the best intentions, sets into motion the unraveling of an American family.
Years later, his family destroyed, Andés is left to make sense of the chaos -- but he is ill-equipped to make sense of his life. He begins a dark journey toward self-destruction, his talent and brilliance brought down by the weight of a burden too frightening and maddening to bear alone. The manifestation of this frustration is a singular rage that finds an outlet in a dark and seedy El Paso bar -- leading him improbably to Grace Delgado.
Recently confronted with her own sense of isolation and mortality, Grace is an unlikely angel, a therapist who agrees to treat Andés after he is arrested in the United States. The two are suspicious of each other, yet they slowly arrive at a tentative working relationship that allows each of them to examine his and her own fragile and damaged past. Andés begins to confront what lies behind his own violence, and Grace begins to understand how she has contributed to her own self-exile and isolation. What begins as an intriguing favor to a friend becomes Grace's lifeline -- even as secrets surrounding the death of Andés' parents threaten to strain the connection irreparably.
With the urgent, unflinching vision of a true storyteller and the precise, arresting language of a poet, Sáenz's In Perfect Light bears witness to the cruelty of circumstance and, more than offering escape, the novel offers the possibility of salvation.

In Perfect Light

Rayo / HarperCollins

From award-winning poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz comes In Perfect Light, a haunting novel depicting the cruelties of cultural displacement and the resilience of those who are left in its aftermath. In Perfect Light is the story of two strong-willed people who are forever altered by a single tragedy. After Andés Segovia's parents are killed in a car accident when he is still a young boy, his older brother decides to steal the family away to Juárez, Mexico. That decision, made with the best intentions, sets into motion the unraveling of an American family. Years later, his family destroyed, Andés is left to make sense of the chaos - but he is ill-equipped to make sense of his life. He begins a dark journey toward self-destruction, his talent and brilliance brought down by the weight of a burden too frightening and maddening to bear alone. The manifestation of this frustration is a singular rage that finds an outlet in a dark and seedy El Paso bar - leading him improbably to Grace Delgado. Recently confronted with her own sense of isolation and mortality, Grace is an unlikely angel, a therapist who agrees to treat Andés after he is arrested in the United States. The two are suspicious of each other, yet they slowly arrive at a tentative working relationship that allows each of them to examine his and her own fragile and damaged past. Andés begins to confront what lies behind his own violence, and Grace begins to understand how she has contributed to her own self-exile and isolation. What begins as an intriguing favor to a friend becomes Grace's lifeline - even as secrets surrounding the death of Andés' parents threaten to strain the connection irreparably.

In Perfect Light: A Novel

Harper-perennial

Tras la muerte de sus padres en un accidente automovilístico, el joven Andrés Segovia y sus hermanos se ven obligados a mudarse a México con el resto de la familia. Esta decisión, a pesar de haber sido tomada con la mejor de las intenciones, es un error que trastornará para siempre la vida de Andrés. Después de varios años de vivir en México luchando contra el estigma de ser un hispano nacido en Estados Unidos y sintiéndose siempre fuera de lugar, Andrés decide regresar a los Estados Unidos. Las autoridades lo detienen un día y lo ponen bajo la tutela de una terapeuta llamada Grace Delgado, una viuda que vive en El Paso. Su relación se convierte pronto en una gran amistad, y justo cuando comienzan a florecer y a disfrutar de su vida juntos, se descubren secretos inconcebibles acerca de la muerte de los padres de Andrés . . . secretos que bien pueden destruir la posibilidad que tienen de ser felices.

En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela (Spanish Edition)

Rayo

This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed - or that they tried to forget. Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient. 
 With Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire SÁenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.

Carry Me Like Water

Dramas & Plays

The Hollywood where Sammy Santos lives is not one of glitz and glitter, but a barrio at the edge of a small New Mexico town. In the summer before his senior year, Sammy falls in love with the beautiful, independent, and intensely vulnerable Juliana. Sammy's chronicle of his senior year is both a love story and a litany of loss, the tale of his love not only for Juliana but for their friends, a generation from a barrio: tough, innocent, humorous, and determined to survive.

Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

Contemporary

Diego, the deaf-mute son of Mexican migrant workers, and his pseudo-yuppie sister, Helen, find their lives transformed when Helen's roommate, a dedicated AIDS nurse, discovers she has the ability for out-of-body travel

Carry Me Like Water: A Novel

Harpercollins

The Espejo family of El Paso, Texas, is like so many others in America in 1967, trying to make sense of a rapidly escalating war they feel does not concern them. But when the eldest son, Gustavo, a complex and errant rebel, receives a certified letter ordering him to report to basic training, he chooses to flee instead to Mexico. Retreating back to the land of his grandfathera foreign country to which he is no longer culturally connectedGustavo sets into motion a series of events that will have catastrophic consequences on the fragile bonds holding the family together. Told with raw power and searing bluntness, and filled with important themes as immediate as todays headlines, Names on a Map is arguably the most important work to date of a major American literary artist.

Names on a Map: A Novel

Three poetic statements unite and intertwine in this slim volume to create a rare insight into the lives of people who bear witness to the exclusionary nature of society's most basic assumptions about the nature of gender and desire: men in women's bodies, outcasts, who make their living as prostitutes. With the caring eye of an intimate observer, Benjamin Alire S‡enz allows the reader to witness the hopes, fears and dangers of their transformations, sketching their daily lives in a series of short fragmentary prose-poems, showing the familiarity of the seemingly alien. Jimmy Santiago Baca's first person poem pushes the transformation further still, allowing as well as forcing the reader to recognize the frailty and pain caused by a culture's ideas of what constitutes the normal. James Drake's photographs unite the poems, complementing them with a visual thread of equally poetic intensity: changing faces, reflections in mirrors, blood and fears, as well as hopes and guardian angels

Que Linda LA Brisa

Arts & Photography

BACA, JIMMY SANTIAGO

Drake, James

Pamela Auchincloss Gallery (New York, N. Y.)

Individual Artists

Pamela Auchincloss Gallery

Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, 2005–Young Adult Library Services AssociationA young adult novel Latino-style–the year is 1969. America is at war, “Hollywood” is a dirt-poor Chicano barrio in small town America, and Sammy and Juliana, about to head into their senior year, are in love.Sammy & Juliana in Hollywood is a Chicano ode to survival. In so many ways, in so many of the characters’ lives, I see images of riding out the storms of youth, of a cultural revolution, of war and of death. But of love, too: lost love, found love, the love for friends and family, for place. What else is there to chase after?–René Saladaña, Jr., author of Finding our Way and The Jumping Tree

Teen & Young Adult

Historical Fiction

Listening Library (Audio)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sáenz, Benjamin Alire

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The House of Forgetting: A Novel

In Perfect Light

In Perfect Light: A Novel

En el Tiempo de la Luz: Una Novela (Spanish Edition)

Carry Me Like Water

Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

Carry Me Like Water: A Novel

Names on a Map: A Novel

Que Linda LA Brisa

Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood