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A beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist turns his pen to the real
people and places that have influenced his life and literature.
978-1-592-40718-7 • U.S. $18.00 / $19.00 CAN.
Memoir
5 5/16” x 8” • 400 pages
Rights: E00
Pub History: Gotham HC, 978-1-592-40629-6
Also available as an e-book
On Sale: 6/5/12
suGGesteD oRDeR
oscar Hijuelos
thoughts Without cigarettes
a memoir
born in manhattan’s morningside Heights to cuban immigrants in 1951, oscar
Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. the
son of a cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry-writing mother, his story,
played out against the backdrop of a working-class neighborhood, takes on an
even richer dimension when his relationship with his family and culture changes
forever. During a sojourn with his mother in pre-castro cuba, he catches a
disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. the
yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved.
With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, Thoughts
Without Cigarettes follows Hijuelos’s subsequent quest for his true identity—a
mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings
of his fiction, and which finds its most glorious expression in his best-known
book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. illuminating the most dazzling scenes
from his novels, Thoughts Without Cigarettes reveals the true stories and indelible
memories that shaped a literary genius.
“In Thoughts Without Cigarettes, a brilliant novelist reveals what makes
him tick and where he and all his characters have come from, offering
us a mesmerizing glimpse of that mystical realm where the grittiest of
realities are transformed into art and memories are redeemed.”
—Carlos Eire, author of Waiting for Snow in Havana
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J u n e • G o t H a m
Photo © Dario Acosta
oscar hijuelos is the international bestselling author of eight novels,
including The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, for which he became the first
latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He also has received the Rome
Prize as well as prestigious grants from the national endowment for the
arts and the Guggenheim foundation. He lives in new york city.