Thoughts without Cigarettes A Memoir
Thoughts without Cigarettes A Memoir by Oscar Hijuelos, published by National Geographic Books on June 5, 2012, is an illustrated exploration of the author’s life and influences. This memoir delves into Hijuelos’s upbringing in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, where he was born to Cuban immigrants. It presents a comprehensive look at the experiences that shaped his identity and literary career, including a significant illness that altered his relationship with language and culture.
Readers will find a rich narrative filled with both humorous and tragic characters as Hijuelos recounts his journey toward self-discovery. The memoir highlights the connections between his personal experiences and his fiction, particularly illuminating elements from his acclaimed work, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Through this reflective account, Hijuelos shares the indelible memories and cultural influences that have defined his life and writing, making it a significant addition to the genres of biography and autobiography.
Official synopsis Publisher
A beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns his pen to the real people and places that have influenced his life and literature. A comprehensive look into the mind of a writer.
Born in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Oscar Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry-writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of a working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship with his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn with his mother in pre-Castro Cuba, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved.
With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, Thoughts Without Cigarettes follows Hijuelos’s subsequent quest for his true identity — a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction, and which finds its most glorious expression in his best-known book,The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Illuminating the most dazzling scenes from his novels, Thoughts Without Cigarettes reveals the true stories and indelible memories that shaped a literary genius.
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