Their Dogs Came with Them A Novel

Award-winning author ofUnder the Feet of Jesus, Helena Maria Viramontes offers a profoundly gritty portrait of everyday life in L.A. in this lyrically muscular, artfully crafted novel.In the barrio of East Los Angeles, a group of unbreakable young women struggle to find their way through the turbulent urban landscape of the 1960s. Androgynous Turtle is a homeless gang member. Ana devotes herself to a mentally ill brother. Ermila is a teenager poised between childhood and politicalconsciousness. And Tranquilina, the daughter of missionaries, finds hope in faith. In prose that is potent and street tough, Viramontes has choreographed a tragic dance of death and rebirth.Julia Alvarez has called Viramontes "one of the important multicultural voices of American literature."Their Dogs Came with Themfurther proves the depth and talent of this essential author.Helena Maria Viramontesis the acclaimed author ofThe Moths and Other StoriesandUnder the Feet of Jesus, a novel; and the coeditor, with Maria Herrera-Sobek, of two collections:Chicana (W)Rites: On Word and FilmandChicana Creativity and Criticism. She is the recipient of the 2006 Luis Leal Award and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, and her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and adopted for classroom use and university study. Viramontes lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is a professor in the Department of English at Cornell University.