Dominoes

And Other Stories from the Puerto Rican

This long-awaited debut collection of fiction from playwright and poet Jack Agüeros is a unique window on the untold stories of the lives of Puerto Rican-Americans.

With a phenomenal richness of detail, Jack Agüeros brings the reality of Puerto Rican experience in New York fully to life. In stories that span the decades of the 1940s through 1990s he recreates the barrio in all its multi-faceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, numbers collectors, tropical fruit vendors and sidewalk games of dominoes, its knife fights and junkies’ raps and its successful stories of craftsmen and entrepreneurs.

These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet experiences, but throughout, Jack Agüeros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion that gloriously affirm quiet moments of grace and triumph in common and ordinary struggles — the real stuff of literature.