"Assimilation is founded on surrender and being broken. This collection of short stories features people who have assimilated, but are actively trying to reclaim their lives. There is a concert pianist who defies death by uploading his soul into his piano. There is the person who draws his mother's ghost out of the bullet hole in the wall near where she was executed. Another character has a horn growing out of the center of his forehead--punishment...

Juan, a Cuban construction worker who has settled in Albuquerque, returns to Havana for the first time since fleeing Cuba by raft twenty years ago. He is traveling with his American wife, Sharon, and hopes to reconnect with Victor, his best friend from college-and, unbeknownst to Sharon, he also hopes to discover what has become of two ex-girlfriends, Elsa and Rosita. Juan is surprised to learn that Victor has become Victoria and runs a popular drag...

Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women. Growing up in London, Maja, a singer, always struggled to negotiate her Afro-Cuban background with her physical home. Yemaya is a Santeria emissary who lives in a mysterious somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. She is troubled by the ease with which her fellow...

"It seemed a little strange, that detective Sergeant Kathleen Doyle wound up being the ranking officer on this particular homicide scene. It was true that DCI Acton was off somewhere, testifying, and DI Williams was chasing down witnesses on the latest Santeria murder, but Doyle couldn't shake the feeling that she was being manipulated, by one or both of them. But to what end? The unidentified victim was a wealthy man, who shouldn't have been mucking...

Eisner Award-nominated artist Mike Hawthorne presents a true and tragic graphic novel memoir about family, abuse, survival and what it means to be Puerto Rican in America. Mike Hawthorne's mother is left alone to raise her son in New York City, a city that torments them both with its unforgiving nature. But when Mike falls victim to an old world Santeria death curse, a haunting sign from the old country of something his mother could never truly escape...