We’re honored to welcome Gina María Balibrera and Nishanth Injam to the store for an event in celebration of their recent releases, The Volcano Daugthers and The Best Possible Experience.

About Gina María Balibrera’s The Volcano Daughters:

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways…

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.

Gina María Balibrera is the author of the novel The Volcano Daughters, forthcoming from Pantheon in August 2024. She’s been awarded grants from the Rackham Institute, a Tyson Award, the Aura Estrada Prize, the Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship, the Periplus Collective, and Tin House. Her work appears in the Boston Review, Latino Book Review, Pleiades, The Wandering Song: An Anthology of the Central American Diaspora, and elsewhere. Originally from San Francisco, she earned an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

About Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience:

Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world and in its American diaspora—all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home.

Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Nishanth Injam’s stories ques­tion what it means to have a home and to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as it is people who are ready to accept you as you are. We see a young man trapped on a bus on the way to visit his parents as his fellow pas­sengers vanish into the restroom. A family, newly in America, determined to host a perfect luncheon for their son’s white classmate—with no idea what to serve him. A woman who returns to a small vil­lage in India every summer to visit the grandfather who raised her, a man who lives with the ghosts of his son and his wife. And a man preparing for his green card interview with the American woman he has paid to marry him.

A sui generis talent, Injam first started writing after coming to the United States from India in his twenties. The Best Possible Experience, his profoundly personal debut collection, delivers a universal in­quiry into the idea of belonging and preserves in writing the home he left behind, before it was lost

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Tags: Chicago, Gina María Balibrera, he Volcano Daughters, Lower West Side, Nishanth Injam, Pilsen Community Books