My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions

My Chicano Heart is a collection of author Daniel A. Olivas’s favorite previously published tales about love, along with five new stories, that explore the complex, mysterious, and occasionally absurd machinations of people who simply want to be appreciated and treasured. Readers will encounter characters who scheme, search, and flail in settings that are sometimes fantastical and other times mundane: a man who literally gives his heart to his wife who keeps it beating safely in a wooden box; a woman who takes a long-planned trip through New Mexico but, mysteriously, without the company of her true love; a lonely man who gains a remarkably compatible roommate who may or may not be real--just to name a few of the memorable and often haunting characters who fill these pages. Olivas’s richly realized stories are frequently infused with his trademark humor, and readers will delight in--and commiserate with--his lovestruck characters.

Each story is drawn from Olivas’s nearly twenty-five years of experience writing fiction deeply steeped in Chicano and Mexican culture. Some of the stories are fanciful and full of magic, while others are more realistic, and still others border on noir. All touch upon that most ephemeral and confounding of human emotions: love in all its wondrous forms.

Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, was born and raised near downtown Los Angeles. He is an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry, including How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories. Widely anthologized, Olivas has written on culture and literature for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, Jewish Journal, Alta Journal, and The Guardian. By day, Olivas is an attorney and makes his home in Southern California.