Hector Tobar - Böcker

In The Last Great Road Bum, Hector Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.

With The Barbarian Nurseries, Hector Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.

BY THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AND PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE 33'A book of extraordinary scope and power' Los Angeles TimesAraceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household, just outside Los Angeles.One morning, after an argument between the parents which turned physical, she wakes to an empty house - except for the two sons she's never had to interact with before. Not knowing what else to do, she decides to track down their grandfather.When Scott and Maureen return to find the children gone, they do what any right-minded middle-class parents would: they panic.Caught in a spiral of guilt, they say things that aren't quite true - and when Araceli is accused of abduction, a national media circus explodes, causing the Torres-Thompson's carefully constructed lives to begin to fall apart . . .'As pacy and informative about the states of America as you would expect from a journalist who won a Pulitzer for coverage of the LA riots . . . Tobar is in total control of his material' Guardian'A virtuosic and hard-hitting novel . . . Exposes disturbing and enlightening ironies about the perpetuation of both privilege and social disadvantage' TLSTobar's hard-hitting novel drills deep into LA's hidden social and racial strata, and explores what happens when these carefully constructed lives implode Independent

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JULIETTE BINOCHE AND ANTONIO BANDERASTHE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST'Riveting ...The best book I've read all year.' Ann Patchett'An astonishing tale of survival' Spectator THE STORY THAT GRIPPED THE GLOBEAugust 2010: the San Jose mine in Chile collapses trapping 33 men half a mile underground for 69 days. Faced with the possibility of starvation and even death, the miners make a pact: if they survive, they will only share their story collectively, as 'the 33'.1 billion people watch the international rescue mission. Somehow, all 33 men make it out alive, in one of the most daring and dramatic rescue efforts even seen.Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Héctor Tobar is the man they choose to tell their story.' An eloquent testament to the human spirit' The Times'A masterful account of exile and human longing, of triumph in the face of all odds.' Los Angeles Times

The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.