Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week, I am featuring works of Puerto Rican writers. I just learned that today is the Day of Illustrious Puerto Ricans. Essentially, the American territory is honoring heroes and notable figures who have significantly contributed to Puerto Rican history and culture. Reading-wise, I can’t say I have read that much work of Puerto Rican writers. This prompted me to feature their works. Besides, this is in line with my current motif of Latin American and Caribbean literature. Without ado, here are some works of Puerto Rican writers I am looking forward to reading.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Simone
Author: Eduardo Lalo

Synopsis: 

Eduardo Lalo is one of the most vital and unique voices of Latin American literature, but his work is relatively little known in the English-speaking world. That changes now: this masterful translation of his most celebrated novel, Simone—which won the 2013 Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize—will introduce an English-language audience to this extraordinary literary talent.

A tale of alienation, love, suspense, imagination, and literature set on the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Simone tells the story of a self-educated Chinese immigrant student courting (and stalking) a disillusioned, unnamed writer who is struggling to make a name for himself in a place that is not exactly a hotbed of literary fame. By turns solipsistic and political, romantic and dark, Simone begins with the writer’s frustrated, satiric observations on his native city and the banal life of the university where he teaches—forces utterly at odds with the sensuality of his writing. But, as mysterious messages and literary clues begin to appear—scrawled on sidewalks and walls, inside volumes set out in bookstores, left on his answering machine and under his windshield wiper—Simone progresses into a cat-and-mouse game between the writer and his mystery stalker. When the eponymous Simone’s identity is at last revealed, the writer finds in the life of this Chinese immigrant a plight not unlike his own. Traumatized and lonely, the pair moves towards bittersweet collaborations in passion, grief, and art. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Happy Days, Uncle Sergio
Author: Magali García Ramis

Synopsis: 

A novel of love and loss set against the rapidly-changing backdrop of 1950s Puerto RicoJuan Martínez Capó called it a “novel that is a joyful chronicle of Puerto Rican solidarity,” and Efraín Barradas stated that its “combination of traditional mythical structure and contemporary realism gives García Ramis’ novel a very special appeal, a present-day ambiguity.”

(Source: Goodreads)

Title: Our Lady of the Night
Author: Mayra Santos-Febres

Synopsis: 

Born into poverty and then abandoned by her mother, Isabel “La Negra” Luberza blossoms into a supremely sensual young woman. Obsessed with attaining aristocratic status—armed with incredible physical presence, indomitable ambition, and keen intelligence—she meets Fernando Fornarís, the man who will forever change her life. With a parcel of land given to her by her rich, white married lover, Isabel transforms herself into a hard-edged and merciless businesswoman—abandoning her own newborn son to become Puerto Rico’s most feared and respected madam, a collector of society’s secrets, a queen of the notorious brothel that emerges as the island’s true political and economic heart.

Set against the rich backdrop of the Caribbean and the United States during the tumultuous years of World War II, Mayra Santos-Febres’s Our Lady of the Night is a breathtaking novel of passion, power, and the devastating price of achieving everything one wishes for. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The House on the Lagoon
Author: Rosario Ferré

Synopsis:

This riveting, multigenerational epic tells the story of two families and the history of Puerto Rico through the eyes of Isabel Monfort and her husband, Quintín Mendizabal. Isabel attempts to immortalize their now-united families–and, by extension, their homeland–in a book. The tale that unfolds in her writing has layers upon layers, exploring the nature of love, marriage, family, and Puerto Rico itself.

Weaving the intimate with the expansive on a teeming stage, Ferré crafts a revealing self-portrait of a man and a woman, two fiercely independent people searching for meaning and identity. As Isabel “Nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is the color of the glass you’re looking through.”

A book about freeing oneself from societal and cultural constraints, The House on the Lagoon also grapples with bigger issues of life, death, poverty, and racism. Mythological in its breadth and scope, this is a masterwork from an extraordinary storyteller. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Macho Camacho’s Beat
Author: Luis Rafael Sánchez

Synopsis:

Over the course of a single afternoon, Macho Camacho’s hit song ‘Life Is A Phenomenal Thing’ blares out of every radio in San Juan and connects the lives of Senator Vicente Reinosa, his poor mistress, his neurotic, aristocratic wife and his fascist son. Full of puns, fantastic wordplay, advertising slogans, and pop-culture references, Macho Camacho’s Beat is a grimly funny satire on the Americanization of Puerto Rico.

One of Puerto Rico’s outstanding literary figures, Luis Rafael Sanchez is renowned for his plays, short stories, essays and poems, as well as his novels. He currently teaches at the University of Puerto Rico. (Source: Goodreads)