Accustomed to being used, a jack-of-all-odd-jobs is torn between desire and duty in a short story about loneliness and wounded love by Cristina Henríquez, the author of The Book of Unknown Americans. Alberto has been alone for the majority of his life, making his way as a restaurant worker and at the beck and call of wealthy and entitled Don Antonio. This time for hire, Alberto arrives at Antonio’s summer house prepared to attend to its regular maintenance. Instead he finds only Antonio’s heartbroken wife, Lola, and a task that could alter his loyalty to his employer forever. Cristina Henríquez’s The Summer House is part of Currency, a compounding collection of stories about wealth, class, competition, and collapse. If time is money, deposit here with interest. Read or listen in a single sitting.
Author
Cristina Henríquez is the author of four books, including The Book of Unknown Americans, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s Top 10 Books of the Year. It was the Daily Beast Novel of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, an NPR Great Read, a Target Book of the Month selection, and was chosen one of the best books of the year by BookPage, Oprah.com, and School Library Journal. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Henriquez is also the author of The Great Divide, The World In Half, and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories. Her work been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Real Simple, and more, as well as in the anthologies State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant. She has been a guest on National Public Radio, and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros in honor of her father.
