A Guatemalan-American writer returns to the Boston suburb of his youth in this American Book Award–winning novel “full of rebellious comedy and vitality” ( New Yorker ). A 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist In Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman’s “brilliantly constructed auto-fiction” (NPR), we meet Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer grappling with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up as the son of immigrants. Having fled Mexico after his journalism provokes the wrong people, Goldberg’s attempt to start fresh in New York. But even as he finds himself falling in love, he is drawn away yet again—back to his childhood home in the white, working-class suburbs of Boston. Frankie is beckoned there by a high school girlfriend who witnessed his youthful humiliations, and by his ailing mother, Yolanda, whose intermittent lucidity unearths forgotten pockets of the past. His brief trip is haunted by memories of his recently deceased father, the Guatemalan woman who helped raise him, and the high school bullies who called him “monkey boy.”
Author
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and 'maestro', at Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez. Goldman is also known as Francisco Goldman Molina, "Frank" and "Paco". He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish-American father. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He currently resides in Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York. He also teaches at Trinity College (Connecticut). Excerpted from Wikipedia.
