Yo-Yo Boing!

(Paperback)

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This groundbreaking novel, set in New York City during the 1990s, is guaranteed to be unlike any literary experience you have ever had. Acclaimed Puerto Rican author Giannini Braschi has crafted this creative and insightful examination of the Hispanic-American experience, taking on the voices of a variety of characters - painters, poets, sculptors, singers, writers, filmmakers, actors, directors, set designers, editors, and philosophers - to draw on their various cultural, economic, and geopolitical backgrounds to engage in lively cultural dialogue. Their topics include love, sex, food, music, books, inspiration, despair, infidelity, jobs, debt, war, and world news. Braschi's discourse winds throughout the city's public, corporate, and domestic settings, offering an inside look at the cultural conflicts that can occur when Anglo Americans and Latin Americans live, work, and play together. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a literary liberation," this energetic and comical novel celebrates the contradiction that makes contemporary American culture so wonderfully diverse. Praise for Yo-Yo Boing!: "Known for their radical linguistic and structural inventions, as well as for their overt political thrust...Giannina Braschi's postmodern poetry collection Empire of Dreams and her ground-breaking bilingual novel Yo-Yo Boing! are an "in-your-face assertion" of the vitality of Latino culture in the US." - The New York Daily News "The novel, evoking the name of the island's famous comedian Yo-Yo Boing!, is neither fully written in English or Spanish, but rather sashays between the two languages much the way Puerto Rico itself sashays between two cultures, two identities, and two languages." - The San Juan Star "Braschi's novel is...a literary liberation. The interlocutors...yo-yo from subject to subject: writers, films, sex, childhood, family and ultimately Puerto Rican artistic expression in New York City. Allusions come helter-skelter, as Fellini, Pee-Wee Herman, Nabokov and even Columbia University Latin Americanist Jean Franco are invoked, celebrated, and derided. Braschi's melange of prose and poetry...is admirable for its energy (and) its experimental format." - Publishers Weekly

Reviews

An in-your-face assertion of the vitality of Latino culture in the U.S. New York Daily News Excitingas much a performance piece as a novel. Harold Augenbraum, National Book Foundation A force to reckon with. Ilan Stavans, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry The best demonstration yet of Braschis extraordinary virtuosityIt is also a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and everyday life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read. Jean Franco, Columbia University A rush of gloriously nuanced sentences that teeter between the grotesque and burlesqueThe text transmutes poetry into novel, into screenplay, dialogue, and by extension to more and sometimes unidentified variants. Doris Sommer, Harvard University It bristles with livelyliterary conversation. Kirkus Reviews Its what I call superb writing. Its as much a performance piece as it is a novel. Barney Rosset, The Evergreen Review A literary liberation. Publishers Weekly Braschi writes beautiful[ly]Playing with word forms in a musical, rhythmic wayReflecting the way language is actually used. Library Journal

Author Bio

A native of Puerto Rico, Giannina Braschi is an influential and versatile writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. She was a tennis champion and fashion model during her youth in San Juan, before moving to Madrid to study with the Spanish poets Carlos Busoo and Claudio Rodriguez. She lived in Paris, Rome, and London before settling in New York, where she has taught at Rutgers University, City University, and Colgate University. She holds a Ph.D. in Golden Age Spanish literature and has written on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo, and Bcquer. Her cutting-edge work in Spanish, Spanglish, and English has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, el diario, PEN American Center, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquea, and Reed Foundation. She currently serves as a literary judge for the PEN Book Awards.