Patricia Engel was born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed debut, Vida, was aNew York Times Notable Book of the Year, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award, Young Lions Fiction Award, and Paterson Fiction Award, winner of the International Latino Book Award and a Florida Book Award, and nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Vida was named a Best Book of the year by Barnes & Noble, Latina Magazine, and NPR, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and longlisted for The Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, and Guernica, among other publications, and her nonfiction has appeared in Black Book and Glamour. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Key West Literary Seminar, Norman Mailer Writer’s Colony, Hedgebrook, Ucross, and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. She lives between Miami and New York. Her novel is forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic.
About VIDA:
Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida marks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise. Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.
In “Lucho,” Sabina’s family—already “foreigners in a town of blancos”—is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of violence, but she is in turn befriended by the town bad boy who has a secret of his own; in “Desaliento,” Sabina surrounds herself with other young drifters who spend their time looking for love and then fleeing from it—until reality catches up with one of them; and in “Vida,” the urgency of Sabina’s self-imposed exile in Miami fades when she meets an enigmatic Colombian woman with a tragic past.
Patricia Engel maps landscapes both actual (New Jersey, New York, Miami, Bogotá) and interior in this stunning debut, and the constant throughout is Sabina—serious, witty, alternately cautious and reckless, open to transformation yet skeptical of its lasting power. Infused by a hard-won, edgy wisdom, Vida introduces a sensational new literary voice.
Links to Purchase:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Vida/Patricia-Engel/e/9780802170781/?itm=1
http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780802170781
Reviews:
“Gloriously gifted and alarmingly intelligent, Patricia Engel writes with an almost fable-like intensity, whether she is describing suburban New Jersey or urban Colombia or some other lost place . . . her ability to pierce the hearts of her crazy-ass characters, to fracture a moment into its elementary particles of yearning, cruelty, love, and confusion will leave you breathless. Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for.”
- Junot Dίaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“The stories in Patricia Engel’s striking debut collection are like snapshots from someone’s photo album: glimpses of relatives, friends, lovers and acquaintances, sometimes posing, sometimes caught by the camera unawares. What makes Sabina’s coming-of-age story so compelling is the arresting voice Ms. Engel has fashioned for her: a voice that’s immediate, unsentimental and disarmingly direct. Ms. Engel proves as adept at depicting the staid, highly class-conscious world of Sabina’s relatives in Bogotá, as she is at capturing the artsy downtown world of New York, and the Miami club scene. She also delineates Sabina’s efforts to articulate an identity of her own — through her relationships with her family and the men she dates — with unsparing psychological precision.”
- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“An arresting and vibrant new voice . . . Unforgettable.”
-Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
“Engel’s impressive sensitivity to nuances is what animates Vida. The titular story is a near-perfect piece of fiction. [Vida] is the literary equivalent of interacting with someone who maintains unceasing eye contact—compelling, impressive and a little unnerving. It’s hard to conceive of a reader who wouldn’t find pleasure in Engel’s humour and intelligence.”
- Molly Young, The Economist
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