The Empanada Brotherhood: A Novel

by John Nichols

Overview

An aspiring writing adrift in New York finds love and community at a corner empanada stand in this novel by the author of The Milagro Beanfield War.

It’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, when ex-patriots, artists, and colorful bums are kings. A tiny stand selling empanadas near the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal streets is the center of the action for the shy narrator, an aspiring writer just out of college. There, he falls in with a crowd of kooky outcasts from Argentina who introduce him to their raucous adventures, melodramatic dreams, and women—particularly a tough little flamenco dancer from Buenos Aires.

Charming and insightful, this deceptively simple novel is a tale told by a master. It is a wise coming-of-age story, full of joy and touched by heartbreak, that captures a special time and place with extraordinary empathy and humor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811870665
Publisher:	Chronicle Books
Publication date:	06/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Nichols is the author of The Milagro Beanfield War and many other works of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent novel was The Voice of the Butterfly, published by Chronicle Books in 2001.

Editorial Reviews

A novel about a band of metaphorical brothers (and sisters and lovers) whose social life centers around an empanada kiosk in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Nichols (The Voice of the Butterfly, 2001, etc.) seems intent on collecting a group of strangely eccentric and self-consciously goofy characters, brought together more by loneliness than by their love for empanadas. The narrator is "blondie," one of the only non-Latinos of the group, a shy and sexually inexperienced young writer, washing dishes at the Night Owl Cafe, penning novels (the robber-baron novel, the Bowery Bum tale, the college romance) and, not surprisingly, collecting rejection slips. He falls desperately in love with Cathy Escudero, a high-strung flamenco dancer from Argentina, who's accompanied, literally, by Jorge, a 17-year-old prodigy on the guitar. At the center of things is Aureo Roldan, empanada cook extraordinaire. While he has the patience of a long-suffering bartender, he also has trouble staying a step ahead of greasing the palms of a bagman for the local Puerto Rican mob. On the periphery are the true oddballs: Luigi, whose face has been hideously deformed by fire; Alfonso, a mathematical genius from Argentina, who's trying to decide which of two fiancees to marry; Chuy, a rich, one-handed gigolo; Eduardo and Adriana, an on-again, off-again couple, each determined to cuckold the other; Popeye, a tattooed sailor who drives a diaper truck and is reputedly an inexhaustible lover. You get the picture. Cathy, the flamenco dancer, has the greatest insight into the meaning of the kiosk: "That empanada stand is a silly place . . . . It's a club for little boys to hang out in who don't want to grow up." Nowthere's one character who speaks the truth. The human energy swirling around the empanada stand is full of sound and fury but signifies very little.

Kirkus Reviews