Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown - Hardcover

Alvarez, Rafael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1936328224 ISBN 13: 9781936328222

Publisher: Citylit Press, 2017

Synopsis

Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Fountain of Highlandtown, this new collection of fiction from a master storyteller continues to mine the lives of Americans we rarely hear about. In Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown, Rafael Alvarez returns to his main theme of exile, the heartbreak of leaving and being left behind set to the sound track of the Beatles, Dylan, and Zappa. From the East Baltimore immigrants stirring the old country back to life in deep-bellied pots and cast iron skillets to the lovers stroking the relics of lost romance, Alvarez's characters yearn for the lost and struggle mightily to make memory as tangible as flesh.

From National Book Award winner James McBride: "Rafael Alvarez's talents--poetic deftness, tight dialogue, burning descriptive passages laid out with seeming ease--show why he was one of the gifted writers that turned The Wire into the greatest show in television history. These are stories from the treasure chest of one of America's most talented scribes, and I am glad he shared them with us."

Published in 1997, The Fountain of Highlandtown heralded the fiction debut of a City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun who wanted to tell stories that would carry no expiration date. A late-night rewrite man, Alvarez used the rest of his time documenting the folklore of his hometown's neighborhoods. The practice imbued his short stories with a blue-collar honesty and kitchen-apron reality. Here is love in all of its pain and joy: love that Alvarez has for his city, that his characters have for one other, and that readers will have for these stories.

For the back cover of that first book, Stuart Dybek--author of Paper Lantern: Love Stories and The Coast of Chicago--said, "Rafael Alvarez's voice has already matured into a savvy, fleet prose style, and a pan-ethnic vision in which his allegiance, rather than to political correctness, is to integrity and vitality." It was twenty years ago today and the band is playing better than ever.

A lifelong Baltimorean, Alvarez began publishing poetry during the Ford Administration by rewriting the lyrics to Robin Trower songs. His early pieces appeared in the News-American--a defunct afternoon paper for the city's working class--and Chicory, a literary magazine published in Baltimore from 1966-to-1983. For twenty years, he worked as a City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun, specializing in the folklore of city neighborhoods. He quit the paper in 2001 to work as a laborer on cable ships and soon after began writing for HBO's police drama, The Wire.

Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown is Alvarez's fourth collection of fiction.

About this title

Review:

This is a Baltimore that most of us have never seen. Behind the marble steps, the tightly shuttered windows of the silent row houses, the chugging tugboats and worn waterfront factories, was a magical old American city of immigrants and dreamers, drunks and gypsies, factory workers and watermen, saloon singers and bully-boys, all making it on nickels and dimes, conducting their lives in a silent symphonic march of gallantry, courage, and quiet dignity.

These are Americans we rarely hear about, told by a gifted native son, who can point to the place in the Chesapeake Bay where his father operated a tugboat and the factories where his grandparents left their sweat and blood. Alvarez's talents--poetic deftness, tight dialogue, burning descriptive passages laid out with seeming ease--show why he was one of the gifted writers that turned The Wire into the greatest show in television history. These are stories from the treasure chest of one of America's most talented scribes, and I am glad he shared them with us.

James McBride
Author, The Good Lord Bird
Winner of the National Book Award

More than anything else this is the story of a love affair; in this case, the beloved is a city.

Rafael Alvarez has no illusions about his city, he loves Baltimore despite its flaws, the violence, corruption, and the pain. He so deeply appreciates and articulates its unique if heartbreaking beauty amidst the ruins of a prosperous and glamorous past as well as its vitality, resilience, poignant sense of dignity and community.

Reading Alvarez's love story, I too began to see the city in a different light, wanting to know it better, even to live it.

Azar Nafisi
Author, Reading Lolita in Tehran
and The Republic of Imagination

About this edition

• Publisher: Citylit Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1936328224
• ISBN 13: 9781936328222
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256