Oscar Hijuelos: Thoughts Without Cigarettes

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Decatur Book Festival (AJC DBF), in association with Oglethorpe University and A Cappella Books, presents a very special evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning, Cuban-American novelist Oscar Hijuelos.

The author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love has just penned a memoir, entitled Thoughts Without Cigarettes, that he will read from, discuss, and sign copies of at Oglethorpe University's Phoebe Hearst Hall (4484 Peachtree Road, NE, Atlanta, 30319) on Monday, June 20 beginning at 7 p.m.

The evening will include traditional Latin-style music performed by Cucho Garcia of the local ensemble San Juan Jam. Guests will also enjoy refreshments provided by Sugarloft, a new Atlanta catering company inspired by Cuban bakeries that fill the palm-lined streets of Miami.

A limited number of tickets are available for this very special evening for $40 per person. Ticket price includes a signed, first edition copy of the new book and benefits the AJC DBF.

Oscar Hijuelos, the first Latin American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has enchanted readers with vibrant characters who hunger for success, love, and self-acceptance. In his first work of nonfiction, Hijuelos writes from the heart about the people and places that inspired his international bestselling novels.

Born in Manhattan's Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry-writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of an often prejudiced working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship to his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved.

With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, Thoughts Without Cigarettes follows Hijuelos' subsequent quest for his true identity into adulthood, through college, and beyond – a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction, and which finds its most glorious expression in his best-known book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Illuminating the most dazzling scenes from his novels, Thoughts Without Cigarettes reveals the true stories and indelible memories that shaped a literary genius.

For tickets, please visit www.acappellabooks.com or call 404-681-5128.