Gary Soto

After unexpectedly falling in love with a "nerdy" boy, fourteen-year-old Marisa works to change her life by transferring to another school, altering some of her behavior, and losing weight.

Accidental love

Puppy Love

A collection of short stories about Mexican American youth growing up in California's Central Valley.

Petty crimes

Hector and his best friend Mondo enjoy many exciting adventures when they take a six-day bike trip from their East Los Angeles neighborhood to the Santa Monica beach during summer vacation.

Summer on Wheels

A Play

Novio Boy

Chato decides to throw a pachanga for his friend, Novio Boy, who has never had a birthday party.

Chato and the Party Animals

Father is a Pillow Tied to a Broom

Revised and Expanded Edition

A Fire in My Hands

Being thirteen is happy, sad, humiliating, surprising, wonderful, awful, exciting, boring -- in other words, full of ups and downs. The thirteen-year-olds in Gary Soto's thirteen stories experience all this and more. In one story, a girl's world is turned upside down when she visits a college campus where she expects to find a rarified atmosphere of intellectual pursuit, only to meet a tour guide who is tattooed, overly pierced, hungover, and not at all focused on academics. In another, two girls test the attraction of their new bodies by flirting with boys at a mall and then find themselves in an uncomfortable and somewhat frightening situation. The stories in this book are about family relationships, friendships, self-worth, and questions of integrity.

Hey 13!

Maya, the flower girl, describes a Mexican American wedding through snapshots of the day's events, beginning with the procession to the altar and ending with her sleeping after the dance.

Snapshots from the Wedding

At Little League, Luis is catching fly balls, stealing bases, and hitting like a champ. But there is a problem: he thinks he's getting good luck from the snacks he samples at the supermarket before every game. Then one day his mom goes directly to the field and he has a horrible practice. The day she skips the stop at the store before a game, he strikes out twice. Luckily, Luis's father understands and convinces him that practice and concentration matter much more than any superstition.

Lucky Luis

Hector and Mando, two Chicano seventh graders from East Los Angeles, visit Hector's uncle in Fresno and find plenty of excitement after they witness a robbery and are chased by the dim-witted criminals.

Crazy Weekend

A collection of poems brings to life themes of childhood, place, and kinship.

A Simple Plan

Expanded from the award-winning Chicano poet’s 1977 original, this poetry collection explores the hardships and joys of migrant workers in California. A timely new edition of a pioneering work in Latino literature, National Book Award–nominee Gary Soto’s first collection (originally published in 1977) draws on California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley, the people, the place, and the hard agricultural work done there by immigrants. In these poems, joy and anger, violence and hope are placed in both the metaphorical and very real circumstances of the Valley. Rooted in personal experiences—of the poet as a young man, his friends, family, and neighbors—the poems are spare but expansive, with Soto’s voice as important as ever. This welcome new edition has been expanded with a crucial selection of complementary poems (some previously unpublished) and a new introduction by the author. Praise for The Elements of San Joaquin “A response to the charged, ideologically defiant voices from the seventies, The Elements of San Joaquin forever changed the course of Latino literature, redirecting us toward the mundane and ephemeral. The poet’s only commitment, Gary Soto seemed to suggest, is to life itself. His teacher and role model was Philip Levine, who encouraged him to see his own neighborhood, indeed his own backyard, as a kingdom. The result was a type of poetry that weathered inclement times in ways that scores of other instant “hits” couldn’t. It was new yet as old as the Bible and it still is. The word “classic” is overused these days. Not in this case.” —Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in the Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, and general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature “In the original The Elements of San Joaquin, Gary Soto defined the Chicano character as an underrepresented part of the American whole, the identity that would serve as foundation for my life’s work. My parents and grandparents had crossed borders, but Soto rooted me, us, here—in the daily poverty of mejicano vecindades—on all those rural “Braly Streets” of Fresno, Brawley, and Salinas. His elements of sun, wind, stars, and field shadowed my own destiny to bring justice there, to the people of the hoe and harvest.” —José Padilla, Executive Director of California Rural Legal Assistance

Poems

The Elements of San Joaquin

For over two decades, the award-winning poet and author Gary Soto has been offering his readers a vision that transcends the ordinary, making him one of today's most celebrated Chicano writers. New and Selected Poems includes the best of his seven full-length collections, plus over 23 new poems previously unpublished in book form. From the charged, short-lined poems of Soto's early writing to an unflinching look at poverty and hard labor in California's Central Valley to the off-beat humor in his longer, more recent work, New and Selected Poems is a timely tribute to a brilliant writer whose work confirms the power of the human spirit to survive and soar.

New and Selected Poems (Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry Books for Teens and Adults)

Twenty-one poems about growing up in an Hispanic neighborhood, highlighting the delights in such everyday items as sprinklers, the park, the library, and pomegranates.

Gary Soto

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