Because Measure C passed, we can continue to count on these services and programs:

From Oakland Public Library Advocates.

From Remy Timbrook, Acting Manager, Piedmont Avenue Branch

Be sure to visit the Piedmont branch at your 20 day, 30 day, 40 day, and 50 day mark in the Summer Reading Program to collect a prize!

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 By Ruby Long, a neighbor whose work has appeared in local and national publications.

Family Album Stories [2010] by Gabriela Alemán

Translated 2022 [by Dick Cluster and Marty Ellen Fieweger, City Lights Books]

Gabriela Alemán first became noticed by the English reading world with Poso Wells. She has long been known and celebrated by Latin American readers. In 2007 she was designated by Bogota39 as one of the most promising, young post-Boom Latin American writers.

The opening story begins in an inn in the Galápagos Islands. The innkeeper and an old man are deep in conversation. They talk of Alexander Selkirk and Robinson Crusoe. They talk of lost treasure. The innkeeper teaches the old man how to scuba dive and they go off in search of their unexpected treasure. Another story, “Summer Vacation,” also takes place on the unpopulated island Floreana. The narrator tells us that in the early 1930s two German couples arrived on the barren island. Later an Austrian baroness and her three lovers arrive. Floreana’s only inhabitants are neighbors but not at all neighborly. By the mid-thirties, the baroness and her lovers one-by-one breakup and leave the island.  The narrator, with conviction if little evidence, tells us that the Germans were spies for Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The visitors are gone. “School Trip” involves two lonely men in an abandoned NYC warehouse that houses an AA meeting hall and a dilapidated laundromat. The men bicker and banter. One is the custodian who also goes to the AA meetings, the other is an Ecuadorian doing his laundry and living in sullen and unforgiving exile. The custodian tells of an international kids’ basketball tournament in upstate New York in 1967. The Ecuadorian kids were the talk of the games and they battle their way to the finals only to have the referees and a coach steal the game. The two men become friends and the Ecuadorian feels renewed warmth for his natal land. There are other stories of John Wayne Bobbitt despairing and raving in Argentina, of “primitive” peoples in the Ecuadorian rain forest - bombarded with bombs by the encroaching oil companies and then bombarded with cheap trinkets by cocksure US missionaries. And then there’s a tale of El Santo, a famous masked lucha libre wrestler, who confuses his battles in rabid stadiums with his battles in the bedroom.

In the first story the innkeeper says “I believe a lot of things, that doesn’t mean they’re true” and the old man talking of treasure hunters, ripostes “I just think that people assume too many things, one of which is that someone who writes tells the truth.” The narrators often have hidden agendas. Many people, some evil, some mysterious, wear literal and metaphorical masks. Unifying themes tie this collection together from New York to the Galápagos, from Argentina to the Ecuadorian rain forest, from Puerto Rico to Quito. The stories link Ecuadorian lives in exile and at home, in history and in imagination. Finally, they all can be seen as metaphors for empire and colonization, for misogyny, for desire, refuge, flight, or rebirth.

For more on the author and this book, check out this colloquium between her and her translator Dick Cluster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=6DJmfHXOvDQ

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