Stealing: Life in America: A Collection of Essays By Michelle Cacho-Negrete

Stealing: Life in America: A Collection of Essays By Michelle Cacho-Negrete

Please join us for the author reading of Stealing: Life in America by Michelle Cacho-Negrete.

Michelle Cacho-Negrete appears to be living proof of the success of the exalted American dream. However, as these prize winning essays illustrate, that is not the whole story. The great historian and writer Paul Fussell tells us, “We’re pretty well stuck for life in the class we’re raised in.” Michelle proudly proclaims this on each page.  She vividly describes her childhood in an inner city slum, bringing us into a life of hunger, violence, poverty, close friendships and what the special love and ambitions of a ghetto mother can accomplish. Although she eventually enters the middle-class in a Long Island suburb and later in Portland, Maine she never quite belongs.  A woman's writing group unaware of rampant hunger in America, an expensive resort town where teenagers purchase frivolous objects for what Cacho-Negrete spends for a month of necessities, happy hours in bars that provide dinner for herself and her sons, her dismay at the gentrification of her old slum neighborhood where the poor are evicted without conscience, illuminate her different view of America.

Michelle Cacho-Negrete's essays have been selected as most notable of the year by Susan Orlean, Mary Oliver, Christopher Hitchens and Jonathan Franzen.  She has received six Pushcart Prize Nominations.  She is in five anthologies including a Norton College Anthology.

Sy Safransky, editor of the Sun Magazine: "Michelle writes with grace and clear-eyed, unsentimental vision."

Lee Hope Betcher, Editor of Solstice Literary Magazine and author of Horsefever: "Throughout this profound, compelling collection, Cacho-Negrete preserves the vanishing past with a hard-hitting yet lush remembrance."

Barry Lyga, best-selling New York Times author: "Michelle Cacho-Negrete explores the intricacies of our world in essays simultaneously unique and universal."

Krista Bremer, author of A Tender Struggle:  "The America we face in these timely essays is often poor, frequently unjust, sometimes heartbreaking – and always illuminated by the author’s fearless truths, keen insights, and fighting spirit.” 

Event date: 
Thursday, November 2, 2017 - 7:00pm
Event address: 
LONGFELLOW BOOKS
Portland, ME 04101
Stealing: Life In America: A Collection of Essays By Michelle Cacho-Negrete Cover Image
$22.30
ISBN: 9780999516416
Availability: On Our Shelves Now: Please call ahead to be sure inventory is not being held for other customers.
Published: Adelaide Books LLC - October 12th, 2017