Anjanette Delgado

Anjanette Delgado is a Puerto Rican novelist and journalist writing about heartbreak, displacement, and social justice. She is the author of The Heartbreak Pill (Simon & Schuster, 2008); which won the Latino International Book Award in 2009 and was a Triple Crown Winner in 2010; and of The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (Kensington Publishing & Penguin Random House, 2014).

She is also the editor of Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, an anthology jusreleased by the University of Florida Press. 

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, as well as in The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Vogue, The New York Times, The Hong Kong Review, NPR, and HBO, among others. 

She is a Bread Loaf Conference alumni, the recipient of an Emmy Award for her feature writing, and served as a judge for the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award in 2015. The following year, she was a Peter Taylor Fellow in Fiction, and in 2020, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ms. Delgado has taught writing for the Center for Literature and the Miami Book Fair at Miami Dade College, for Florida International University, and for writer’s conferences from New Jersey to Mexico City and Puerto Rico. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She lives in Miami.

Book Reviews by Anjanette Delgado

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“It is a long story set to music, a rich and jeweled history sung to the rhythm of the decades, each poet making a case for joy . . .”

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“it doesn’t forget to be wise, beautiful, or lyrical even in the bloodiest of moments, never losing sight of the real story even as lives explode and everything appears to be over but the n

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In a way, Xochitl González’s Anita de Monte Laughs Last is almost two novels in one, both great.

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There’s a memorable line in the Latin American classic Women With Big Eyes that reads, “Aunt Daniela fell in love the way intelligent women always fall in love: like an idiot.”

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“an intensely lyrical, philosophical novella by a gifted writer, easily capable of these sophisticated leaps and drops.”

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Time Is a Mother is a true magic trick. The message made into shapes sharp with meaning, . . .”

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“a deeply charming story full of complex insights delivered from a simple, humanistic point of view . . .”

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“soars on the strength of language and passion for the ideas [the author] works hard to depict here, so that if you loved The Sympathizer, and you don’t mind the insistent history

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We Should All Be Feminists: A Guided Journal is, really, a course about the world, as it is, as it has been, as it could be if we would finally see clearly the extent of the damage that pa

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What do you do when the world refuses to look at you, to really see you? When, still, your life is expendable if the smallest excuse for taking it can be conjured?

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“beauty, rhythm, insight, resonance.”

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“Kirby has created a book that is also a lit picture window into a world that looks a lot like this one, but is infinitely kinder, more gentle, more full of awe and wonder and love . .

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Every year, there is a pilgrimage (of sorts).

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Let’s not call this a review, deal? Who reviews June Jordan? She was the queen of everything.

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The reviews are in. Vigorous. Exuberant. Boisterous. Energetic. Not the usual words used to describe coming-of-age-poor memoirs such as My Broken Language.

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Maybe you thought it was impossible. That it didn’t exist. You would never find a contemporary short story collection that was more than well written.

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The Twilight Zone is a novel about the long and brutal dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet in Chile from 1973 to 1990, yes.

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Documentary photographer Donna Ferrato has been photographing women for at least 50 years, but Holy, her latest book, might just be her most personal one since the award-winning Living

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The Food of Oaxaca: Recipes and Stories from Mexico’s Culinary Capital is right about Oaxaca, if arguably so.

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What is an I-Novel? The I-Novel is a literary genre in Japanese literature.

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Dorthe Nors’ Wild Swims is a collection of 14 short stories written tightly and tensely, with most under a thousand words.

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The modern, post COVID feel of the word longing is different, isn’t it? A longing is now more than a want. Maybe even more than a need. Poet Natalie Shapero gets that.

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The Danger of Smoking in Bed underlines the darkness of evil.

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“seeing, feeling, remembering, transforming, articulating what was, what is, what could have been. If only.”

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Balancing and mixing, with rhyme and reason, love and anger, good and bad, memory and the created present, all to tell the story of a life, a memoir unrestrained, devoid o

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Foreshadow: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading and Writing YA is a fantastic book. Full stop.

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Wes Anderson: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work is a satisfying book that will deepen enjoyment of watching (or rewatching) an Anderson film for any fan.”

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Knee Deep lets itself be a story of solidarity, a tale about the glue that binds communities together, as told by the voice of a young one who, like us, the readers, is just wakin

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Raggin’ On: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s House and Journals may look like a book, but it is really an entire life devoted to art with which an effort to compact, to condense an

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Can a novel be about a moment? About a group of people, unique and familiar at the same time, living through that moment that doesn’t yet have a name or any one specific date?

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“The Boy in the Field is a literary mystery novel. . . . Just not the kind that focuses on what happens on a patch of land, a highway, or even a country.

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The poems in A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship are poetry as ode to the future of hidden, buried things, be they land, soon to be overcome by rising tides and disappeared, or memories of the

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The crimes we commit in search of security and protection, for ourselves or our loved ones, are at the center of Andrea Camilleri’s latest Inspector Montalbano adventure, The Safety Net.

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If there was ever a fitting book to read during compulsory social isolation, it is Malicroix, the French Gothic classic novel by Henry Bosco, first published in 1946, and now available in

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Not every novel has to feel like a novel. Global literature is, arguably, all the better for works that broke every rule and succeeded.

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This is a book review of The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays of D. H. Lawrence, edited and with an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

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Space Invaders is a novella, barely 66 pages, each one only seven-by-five inches, that effectively holds between its covers a story extending far beyond the physical space it might occupy

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One of the best things about Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, is that it is so very Joyce Carol Oates, every story imbued with

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There is something so honest about Gather: A Dirty Apron Cookbook by David Robertson. It starts with the aesthetics. It’s a book that feels heavy, solid.

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The Best American Short Stories anthology has been published yearly and without interruption since 1915.

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Louise Bourgeois: An Intimate Portrait is an art book in the way an antique rococo picture frame might be art.

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Frankisstein by Jeanette Winterson is a novel that is also a metaphor.

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“You will end up in love with Olive because she is a ton of well-written fun. You’ll enjoy her musings and put-downs and her reflections.

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“For over 30 years, Sharon Olds has been writing poems about the unspeakable: bad love, great love, death, childbirth, child abuse, illness, oppression, rape, racism, violence, and sexism.”

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There is a gift that surprises in the poems of Fanny Howe’s latest book of poetry, Love and I, and that gift is trust.

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“these are heady themes, but Moffett handles them with a sure hand, managing the magic, directing its music.”

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“Smith is unarguably a talented writer with a great command of rhythm and rhyme, of imagery and simile and all things lyrical.”

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“there was courage and conviction in his decision to eschew the title of abstraction that so many of his peers pursued in favor of a lifelong commitment to the tradition of representational

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You pick it up. The cover reads I Will Destroy You: Poems, Nick Flynn. There is a forest nymph dancing with a bear. Cool, you think.

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Here now come The Guardians: keepers of our urban landscape’s heart and soul by way of the unique small retail business, the bespoke shop at the literal center of the world’s towns and cit

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“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

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“Long before immigration was a topic we debated daily, sometimes hourly, Edwidge Danticat wrote for, and about, immigrants.”

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The Ghost Clause by Howard Norman is a novel about intellectuals. Or rather, it’s a novel about marriage and American village life as seen through intellectual eyes.

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Maggie Brown & Others is a book of shorter-than-most stories that is finished off with a shorter-than-most novel, or novella.

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Raven is delightful, both the book of poems by John Smelcer and the character capable of playing any role in this poetic movie of all our lives that Smelcer has written.

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Lee Krasner: Living Colour is a book that offers everything needed to know and understand the work and important contributions of Krasner to abstract painting, but also most of wh

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The narrative world is rife with accounts of the relationship between gender, and the recognition and attribution (or not) of genius.

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“Paint[s] an engaging picture of an artistic master who, for a figurative painter, was as generous with precise detail, symbolism and personal motives, as he was with color, while never dis

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“a gorgeously written novel about race, about class, about street life and gender and the ragged ways we have chosen to define them.”

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In Show Up for Salad: 100 More Recipes for Salads, Dressings, and All the Fixins You Don’t Have to Be Vegan to Love, Terry Hope Romero does a lot more than provide a few recipes for those

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Anthony Bourdain Remembered is a crowdsourced eulogy of a book that will be published on May 27, just a few days before the anniversary of his death on June 8, 2018.

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“[S]ome empowering concepts and more than a few compelling arguments should you decide to approach Don’t Read Poetry . . .

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There are books about art that are just about art, and there are books that, rather than ignore the mixed media elephant in the room, frame the art they feature in whatever social, geographic, poli

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“[Y]ou might think of this book as you would your very own vegetable-cooking school + toolbox + charismatic coach in one.”

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“through the lens of the women they depicted in their work, women as warriors, as workers, as prostitutes, as mothers, as lovers, ever present even in absence, every work shining a light on

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Appropriately, given the current challenges faced by women of color, the last few years have seen a resurgence and a reclaiming of the contributions of non-white, non-binary feminist poets.

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“Read Out East to remember what it was like: the sad, tragic, emotionally turbulent truth of first love. And then stay for the prose.

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Theodore Boone: The Accomplice by John Grisham has a lot going for it.

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The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media by Jay David Bolter is a book about exactly that: the decline of one thing and the rise of another.

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Here is the book so many have been waiting for. The book to make sense of so many others.

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Every year, more than six million people visit the Louvre Museum in Paris to view Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for an estimated average of 15 seconds.

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First published in 1931 and later in 1988, Castle Gripsholm is a short novel by German journalist, satirist, commentator, playwright, songwriter, poet, and novelist Kurt Tucholsky.

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“Beverly Cleary once said great fiction should be, above all things, a pleasure to read, and Westside is certainly that, and then some.”

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“Walking: One Step at a Time may feel like the road until now seldom taken: a book that is part rumination, part walking coach and companion . . .

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“[A] thrilling, touching, beautiful book.”

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The stories in Ha Seong-Nan’s Flowers of Mold are an acquired taste. Fortunately, taste for them can be developed awfully fast.

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“As literary genres go, poetry is among the most democratic and fluid, with sub-genres to accommodate the intentional breaking of rules, the joyous flouting of form, and the expression of a

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“Not only did this novel . . .

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Renee Gladman’s Morelia is a novella about the sentence. Well, no. Not really.

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Once in a while, you read a book that, though clearly labeled “fiction,” tells a story that really happened.

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“what is most important about this, the last of Brabcová’s gifts, what makes it deserving of a place in the most minimalist of bookshelves, is its honest, overwhelming beauty, its celebrati

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“this is a book by a talented teller who tells his tales with love for his reader, cleverly but responsibly (never cheating literature), the beauty and imagery of the verse providing a thor

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“Its exercise in deeper sight works like a certain clairvoyance, as you realize the dancing you heard before, was the sound of feet trying to run from oblivion, to save themselves by provin