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John Manuel Arias | La Comunidad Reads with Lupita Aquino

Where There Was Fire

Author John Manuel Arias joins Lupita Aquino - better known as Lupita.Reads - for a compelling discussion about his lush debut novel "Where There Was Fire."

Lupita Aquino invites you to join her new book club, La Comunidad Reads, an author-inclusive club that aims to build a space where Latine-authored books are magnified for all readers!

For this meeting of the La Comunidad Reads Book Club, poet and writer John Manuel Arias joins Lupita to talk about his debut novel, Where There Was Fire. They will discuss the intergenerational impacts of Machismo + Maranismo roles within the Latinx community through the queer Latinx lens, how it emphasizes the role of women as family and home-centered, encouraging passivity, self-sacrifice and chastity. They will also delve into the current stat eof magical realism in literature, the impact of U.S. agribusiness in Latin American and much more. 

About John Manuel Arias

John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer. He is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. His prose and poetry have been published in PANK, The Rumpus, F(r)iction, Joyland Magazine, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. Where There Was Fire is his first novel.

About Where There Was Fire

A lush and lyrical debut novel about a Costa Rican family wrestling with a deadly secret, from rising literary star John Manuel Arias

Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company's most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde's family is changed forever.

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family's rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There was Fire.

La Comunidad Reads with Lupita Aquino is generously supported by the DC Public Library Foundation.

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