Monkey Boy: A Novel
May 2021 · Grove Press
Ebook
341
Pages
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About this ebook
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.”
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.”
About the author
Francisco Goldman has published four previous novels and two books of nonfiction. The Long Night of White Chickens was awarded the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The Interior Circuit was named by the Los Angeles Times one of 10 best books of the year. The Art of Political Murder is now an HBO documentary. Goldman’s most recent novel, Say Her Name, won the Prix Femina étranger. His books have been published in sixteen languages.
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