CAMBRIDGE, MA, September 28- The Main Library will welcome Xochitl Gonzalez for a reading and signing of her New York Times bestseller, Olga Dies Dreaming, on Tuesday, October 17, from 6-7:30 p.m. Gonzalez will be in conversation with local poet and artist Jess Rizkallah, author of the magic my body becomes. Attendees can join in-person or online. Registration is required.
Olga Dies Dreaming follows Olga, a high-profile wedding planner for Manhattan’s power brokers, and her brother, Prieto, a popular congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn, as they juggle their public and personal lives. The arrival of a new love interest, Matteo, and their estranged mother and Young Lord turned radical, Blanca, forces Olga to confront the effects of long-held family secrets. Xochitl Gonzalez’s Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife, and the very notion of the American dream.
A New York Times Book Review says, “"Liberation is at the heart of Olga Dies Dreaming. The story’s driving tension derives from questions of how to break free...The book’s title is an allusion to the poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” by Pedro Pietri, which contains the lines “Olga / dies dreaming of a five dollar raise.” But Gonzalez’s Olga will not go meekly to such a fate. Sometimes we must free ourselves — even from dreams."
Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming. Named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR, Olga Dies Dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and The New York City Book Awards. Her new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, is forthcoming in March 2024 with Flatiron Books. Gonzalez is a 2021 M.F.A. graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, she was recognized as a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and lives in her hometown of Brooklyn with her dog, Hectah Lavoe.
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