The Ordinary Seaman

Francisco Goldman

Des. 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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In this acclaimed novel, the Pulitzer Prize–finalist explores the perils, passions, and adventures of a young Nicaraguan immigrant trapped in Brooklyn.

Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsday, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Publishers Weekly

In the late 1980s, teenage Sandinista soldier and avowed communist Esteban Gaitán leaves Nicaragua to begin a new life in America. He soon arrives on a desolate Brooklyn pier with fourteen other men to form the crew of the ship Urus.

Elias and Mark, the owners of the Urus, hold the men captive, forcing them to work in a vain attempt to make the rotting vessel seaworthy. Without the means to return home, Esteban remains a virtual prisoner, haunted by the loss of the woman he loved during the war. Eventually learning how to sneak off the ship, he makes nocturnal forays into Brooklyn, where he meets a Mexican immigrant named Joaquina, and begins to plot his permanent escape.

Centering his novel around Esteban, but also telling the stories of his fellow landlocked sailors, Francisco Goldman proves once again that he is “a major talent of great style and soul” (The Miami Herald).

“Often very funny . . . Here, a corner of Brooklyn becomes the exotic and foreign experience, and through Esteban’s eyes it is as mysterious and alluring as Tangiers.” —The Dallas Morning News

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Francisco Goldman has published four novels and two books of nonfiction. The Long Night of White Chickens was awarded the American Academy's Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including, twice, The Pen/Faulkner Prize. The Ordinary Seaman was a finalist for The International IMPAC Dublin literary award. The Divine Husband was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. The Art of Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award and the WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, published in 2013, was named by the LA Times one of ten best books of the year and received The Blue Metropolis "Premio Azul" 2017. His most recent novel, Say Her Name, won the 2011 Prix Femina Etranger. His books have been published in sixteen languages. Francisco Goldman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the NY Public Library, and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also received a 2017 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Prize, and has just been named a recipient of PENMexico’s 2017 Award for Journalistic and Literary Excellence. He has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Believer, and many other publications. He directs the Aura Estrada Prize (www.auraestradaprize.org). Every year Goldman teaches one semester at Trinity College in Hartford, CT., and then hightails it back to Mexico City.