A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son

"How does a Mexican American, the son of immigrants, a child of the border--la frontera--leave home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the seductive promises of wealth and elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern old-fashioned father who has only known hard labor his whole life? With a misfit family that breaches all decorum even at a funeral? With echoes of Dreiser's American Tragedy and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the twenty-first century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering illusions of new worlds which ultimately seem so empty" -- Provided by publisher.