NOVELS IN ENGLISH

Encore! Encore!

Part novel, part drama, all poetry, Encore! Encore! hooks the reader and doesn’t let go. Readers will travel to a world rarely on center stage—the male sex tourism industry—and depart unable to see the Caribbean the same way ever again. Watching how young men hustle not for extra earnings, not for themselves, but for everything, for everyone else, we fall in love with unlikely heroes. Moving between the US, the Caribbean, and Spain, the characters offer complex performances of identity, masculinity, and friendship. Lyrical, intertextual, and haunting, this novel will have readers repeating, Encore! Encore!

—Ylce IrizarrY, Ph.D., author of Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad

A novel in three acts, Encore! Encore! presents the intersecting lives of young Dominican men and their (often Gringo) johns. Deftly pushing on the parameters of Latinx sexuality, Elías Miguel Muñoz weaves together a series of actors in the queer sex tourist industry of Santo Domingo. The major players—Luis, Richard, Paul, and Antonio—navigate, justify, profit from, and dare to dream beyond a market that colonizes, exploits, and tropicalizes queer dominicanidad. ... Their sexual and dialogic exchanges ripple into spheres of family, history, and speculative imagination, as the characters come to terms with their own desires and agency in this dynamic production.

—Kristy Ulibarri, Ph.D., author of Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives

Thread by thread, traveling across the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, Elías Miguel Muñoz weaves a complex and poignant network of relationships, all connected by a shared exploration of how different types of love shape our personal worlds. This is a novel to be read aloud, savoring the rhythmic nuances offered by a skillfully crafted counterpoint made of multiple voices and points of view. Through its ensembles and agile tunes, this books recalls the fluid fabric of a contemporary musical. 

—Leo Cabranes-Grant, Ph.D., Award Winning Professor and Playwright, University of California, Santa Barbara

Whether in the Global North or the Global South, patriarchy, family, and the state function in analogous ways in Elías Miguel Muñoz’s Encore! Encore! This is, above all, a novel about friendship between characters who don’t know who is writing their stories and are searching for their own voices to tell those stories. They perform with a difference, and they escape their daily struggles through the power of the imagination and art—be it music, literature, theater, or science fiction. As when watching good theater, you recognize along with the characters that these stories are fabricated and, as such, they can be changed. You revel in the wordplay and in the homage paid to artists who are near and dear to Muñoz. Encore! Encore! is a novel that, like the telenovelas that it so deftly critiques, hooks you and once you start reading you cannot put it down.

—Lillian Manzor, Ph.D., author of Marginality Beyond Return: US Cuban

Performances in the 1980s and 1990s

DIARY OF FIRE

“Diary of Fire, a roman à clef that explores exile and alienation through the lens of gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. Surprisingly, Diary of Fire also dares take on the possibility of—gulp— contentment, of coming to peace with our contradictions. Diary of Fire is delivered with Muñoz’s usual brilliance, humor and passion, which means it’s, as expected, utterly delightful.”

—Achy Obejas, author of the novels Memory Mambo, Days of Awe, and Ruins

“This captivating novel is a tribute to the voice: the voice of memory and history, the voices of memorable songs, the voices of friends, lovers, family, mentors, other writers, critics and philosophers, all woven together like an elegiac and often hilarious symphony. These unheroic yet meaningful lives are poignantly rendered by Muñoz in a clean, poetic prose, laced with longing, desire, and good old Cuban choteo.”

—Alan West-Durán, author of Tropics of History, Finding Voices in the Rain, and Cuba: A Reference Guide.

“Quintessentially Caribbean in its rejection of a binary approach to identity formation, Diary of Fire proposes a kind of poetics of indeterminacy, an alchemistic vision in which the contrapuntal and paradoxical reside alongside the monophonic and homogeneous. Muñoz’s protagonist embraces the ephemeral, and inhabits an interstitial space where past, present and future coalesce; gender, ethnicity, and sexuality are on a continuum; pleasure and desire are polyphonic; and art and lived reality”

—Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, author of Remembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora, The Pearl of the Antilles, and Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House

“Through ludic experimentation with narration and genre, frank exploration of sexuality, academia, and publishing, and an inexorable drive toward liberation from the strictures of labels, identitarian and literary alike, Diary of Fire provides a refreshing example of Latinx autofiction. More important, Muñoz insists on carving out a sustainable ethos of literary production through redefining a masculine creativity that is feminist and queer—a vital contribution to Latinx literature in the #MeToo era.”

—john ribÓ, cuban studies

THE GREATEST PERFORMANCE

“Muñoz traces the lives of best friends Rosa and Mario from their childhood in Cuba through their immigration to the United States. The novel, which explores such themes as friendship, gender roles and cultural displacement, is gaining recognition as the first U.S. Latino work to deal with AIDS.”

—Los Angeles Times

“A sensitive, lyrical novel about how it feels to be an exile, even in one’s own country.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“The snapshot-like reminiscences of the alternating narrators are sometimes comic, frequently poignant, and almost always strongly sensuous.”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL

“Muñoz’s technique is subtle: an interweaving of moments of heartbreak and rejection with delightful incidents of satire and bitchy good humor. The prose is crisp and elegant, often in counterpoint to the story being told… Muñoz’s characters live vibrantly within their self-created microcosms…”

—MULTICULTURAL REVIEW

“Mr. Muñoz’s characters are rare gems in contemporary fiction, especially in recent Cuban-American letters being written in English.”

—THE MIAMI HERALD

“…a work of many firsts: the first gay-themed fiction to be published by a Chicano-Latino publishing house (Arte Publico Press); the first Latino work to deal with AIDS; and one of the first novels whose major theme is a friendship between a lesbian and a gay man of color.”

—BAY AREA REPORTER

BRAND NEW MEMORY

“A powerful and deeply spiritual coming-of-age novel… In this remarkable fourth novel… Muñoz presents refreshing, multidimensional characters. Recommended for all libraries.”

—Library Journal

“[A]s the child of first-generation Cuban immigrants, Gina... is not the product of a settled ethnic tradition, traditional religious ceremonies, and older notions of culture. One day Gina chances upon a box of letters her paternal grandmother has been writing from Cuba. She learns that her abuela, Estela, is in fact actually coming to visit the family... At last Estela arrives, like a dream herself–or the rebuke of dreams. Estela... is authentic.”

—Michigan Quarterly Review

“This original and wonderfully written tale is laced with vivid symbolism and plenty of Cuban/Caribbean humor.”

—NICHOLASA MOHR
WINNER OF THE HISPANIC HERITAGE AWARD FOR LITERATURE,
AuTHOR of Nilda, Bronx Remembered, and Rituals of Survival: A Woman's Portfolio

“An engaging and many-layered story about the burdens of exile and the redemptive power of imagination. Elías Miguel Muñoz’s best and most ambitious novel to date.”

—GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT
AUTHOR OF NEXT YEAR IN CUBA AND LIFE ON THE HYPHEN: THE CUBAN AMERICAN WAY

“Elías Miguel Muñoz is one of the most exciting American writers to spring out of the U.S. Latino/a experience... Brand New Memory brings it all together: the American dreams, the Cuban exile diaspora, and the mall pop-culture mentality. And it does so with such heartaching force, you can't help but be swept into his world. ”

—HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES
AUTHOR OF UNDER THE FEET OF JESUS AND THE MOTHS AND OTHER STORIES

“[E]l mundo de Gina Domingo trata de fundir y de integrar las experiencias de clase media de los adolescentes mainstream, no minoritarios, anglosajones. Suya es la eterna condición de los étnicos: la hibridez que causa el no ser aceptado completamente ni en un mundo ni en otro”.

—ELIANA RIVERO
DISCURSOS DESDE LA DIÁSPORA (CÁDIZ: ADUANA VIEJA, 2005): 147.

“Muñoz seems to be trying to reverse the weight of the hyphen, which in some 1.5 and second-generation Cuban American books, leans toward America [...] In a reverse of much of Latina/o literature portraying first-generation immigrants, the American of Brand New Memory wants to become Cuban.”

—YLCE IRIZARRY 
CHICANA/O AND LATINA/O FICTION: THE NEW MEMORY OF LATINIDAD
(Champaign: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS, 2016): 162

CRAZY LOVE

“Intensity pulsates through its pages, with the scenes set in Cuba and the directly family-linked California sequence as the most finely crafted. The novel belongs to the now-venerable coming-of-age-in-America tradition, yet has an urgent newness to it…”

—HISPANIA (1991)

“As if perched on the cachumbambé (the seesaw) that serves as a central image in Muñoz's first novel, at the end of Crazy Love Julian finds himself suspended between his native culture, which he cannot renounce, and his adoptive one, in which he does not yet belong…”

—DISPOSITIO

“The novel is as much a portrait of the self and of the family as it is a denunciation of the love that joins, binds, and strangles when it becomes misdirected. In the novel there are moments of humor, tenderness, eroticism, and even violence…”

—BILINGUAL REVIEW