It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the big arena of New York, where they are workers by day, stars of dance halls by night. Hijuelos's marvelous portrait of the Castillo brothers, their families, their fellow musicians and lovers, their triumphs and tragedies, re-creates the sights and sounds of an era in music and an unsung moment in American life. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

The Mambo Kings are two brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, Cuban-born musicians who immigrate to New York City in 1949. They form a band and enjoy modest success, their popularity peaking in 1956 with a guest appearance on the I Love Lucy show. PW lauded this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel: ``Hijuelos's pure storytelling skills commission every incident with a life and breath of its own.'' (Aug.) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Oscar Hijuelos, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was born in New York City and educated at the City College of New York. Hijuelos's novels Our House in the New World (1983) and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), deal with Cubans who immigrated to America in the 1940s. Concerned with questions of identity and perspective, both novels attempt, in Hijuelos's words, to "commemorate at least a few aspects of the Cuban psyche (as I know it)."

Hijuelos's writing is emotional, generous, and elegant; although his novels are in one sense realistic, they also reflect the magic-realist tradition of Latin American writing. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hijuelos's imagination is epic---he follows his characters' lives from their origins in Cuba to their final days of squalor in Spanish Harlem. Hijuelos portrays with clarity and sympathy characters who succumb to the pressures that "work against the [American] dream of upward mobility."

Hijuelos's novel, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993), is quite different from his prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. While that earlier work focused on Cuban-American fraternal machismo, the latter work celebrates femininity in a Pennsylvania family of mixed Cuban and Irish descent. Though displaying some aspects of magic-realism, the work is, in most respects, a realistic account of the lives of its characters. Winner of numerous awards, Hijuelos has been recognized as introducing a new, strong voice to contemporary American fiction.

(Bowker Author Biography) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.