Newton-San Juan del Sur Sister City Project

To learn about (and order a copy of) David Gullette’s novel DREAMING NICARAGUA, which is set in San Juan del Sur, go to Fenway Press.

All proceeds from the sale of this book benefit the work of the Newton/San Juan del Sur Sister City Project.

FENWAY PRESS ANNOUNCES THE PUBLICATION OF

DREAMING NICARAGUA: Jesse Pelletier is a Vietnam vet who runs a cheap hotel named Ospedjae Gringo Pinolero in San Juan del Sur, a beach town in southern Nicaragua. The year is 2000. Jesse’s previously-estranged daughter, Suzy, is visiting him for the first time; she falls for a local ecological activist, Camilo Sanchez, who promptly disappears. Or maybe he has been disappeared. Counterpointed with this realistic millennial material is an earlier, imagined San Juan del Sur, in the 1850s, where another Jesse Pelletier, veteran of the Mexican War, has married a local girl and runs a hotel catering to the Gold Rush-bound passengers of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York-San Francisco steamship line. The parallel timeframes and intrigues and characters (including Mark Twain and the “Filibuster” chief, William Walker) echo off against each other as the tension rises.

DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares writes: “In all, this is a full, rich novel, full of stories, full of characters, full of pleasures, and full of stylistic experimentation. The montage and collage does build to the epic, in Dos Passos’s sense. The range of voices is wonderful.  The natural description is wonderful.  At center, of course, is Jesse’s journey as poet and imaginative historian, as meditative seeker ‘for what will suffice.’”

Warner Berthoff of Harvard writes: “Drawing on an intimate knowledge of present-day Nicaragua and on a mastery of its checkered past as a target of North American imperialism, David Gullette has woven a compelling tapestry of Nicaragua’s beleaguered history. Past and present converge in a narrative that is both dramatically intense and historically accurate.”

An excerpt from DREAMING NICARAGUA was published in Ploughshares (Fall 2008). All proceeds from the sale of the book benefit the Newton/San Juan del Sur Sister City Project. To order a copy, send a check for $18.50 (which includes shipping and handling) to:

Fenway Press, 68 Pembroke St. Newton, MA 02458.

To use PayPal, go to Fenway Press “Fair Trade for Authors”