New Releases by Gary Soto

A collection of the author''s reminiscences in prose.

An exuberant celebration of everyday life from an award-winning team.

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his reader to a ground-level perspective, resreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles," his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of basesall." The child''s world is made up of small things--small, very important things.

"Fourteen-year-old Lincoln Mendoza, an aspiring basketball player, must come to terms with his divided loyalties when he moves from the Hispanic inner city to a white suburban neighborhood" -- Title page verso.

From "Worry at the end of the month" to "Good morning, Fresno," Soto writes of the Chicano experience and of life as all live it.

Eight-year-old Nicole, who is part Mexican, is amazed when her cat Pip starts speaking in Spanish.