Episode Description:
In partnership with WTTW and other local PBS stations, PBS Books Heather-Marie Montilla is joined by Sandra Cisneros to discuss the release of the 40th Anniversary Edition of The House on Mango Street as the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival author featured this week by PBS Books.
“The House on Mango Street” is one of the most cherished novels of the last 50 years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting.”
The 24th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, August 24, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
About the Book:
The House on Mango Street is featured at the 2024 National Book Festival for a special celebration of the 40th anniversary.
The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting.”
Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you’re from.
Guest Biography:
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist and essayist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her numerous awards include National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. A new collection of poetry and its Spanish translation, “Woman Without Shame,” Cisneros’s first in 28 years, was published in 2022. Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold over seven million copies, has been translated into over 25 languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school and universities across the nation.
