A modern retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic that addresses issues of belonging and assimilationAn unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial process, maneuvers through a near-future world that both needs and resents him. As the United States president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez. His world expands as he meets her network...

By the author of Chicano Frankenstein, this is "Waiting for Godot" in a modern retelling with Borderlands immigration and ICE in the mix. Waiting for Godínez has been workshopped in Los Angeles and New York, had a world premiere in Sacramento, California, and is being shopped to Los Angeles, Arizona, and New Mexico stages.Olivas’s extraordinary reimagining of a classic play lays bare the destructive and brutalizing effects of the United States’ an...

How to Date a Flying Mexican is a collection of stories derived from Chicano and Mexican culture but ranging through fascinating literary worlds of magical realism, fairy tales, fables, and dystopian futures. Many of Daniel A. Olivas’s characters confront—both directly and obliquely— questions of morality, justice, and self-determination.The collection is made up of Olivas’s favorite previously published stories, along with two new stories—one dystopian and the other magic...

My Chicano Heart is a collection of author Daniel A. Olivas’s favorite previously published tales about love, along with five new stories, that explore the complex, mysterious, and occasionally absurd machinations of people who simply want to be appreciated and treasured. Readers will encounter characters who scheme, search, and flail in settings that are sometimes fantastical and other times mundane: a man who literally gives his heart to his wife who keeps it beating safely in a...

Wanderers and writers, gangbangers and lawyers, dreamers and devils. The King of Lighting Fixtures paints an idiosyncratic but honest portrait of Los Angeles, depicting how the city both entrances and confounds. Each story serves as a reflection of Daniel A. Olivas’s grand City of Angels, a “magical metropolis where dreams come true.”The characters here represent all walks of L.A. life—from Satan’s reluctant Craigslist roommate to a young girl coping with trauma at her bro...

When Moses descended Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, he never could have foreseen how one family in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century would struggle to live by them.Conchita, a voluptuous, headstrong single woman of a certain age, sees nothing wrong with enjoying the company of handsome—and usually much younger—men...that is, until she encounters a widower with unusual gifts and begins to think about what she really wants out of life.Julieta, Conchita...

From acclaimed fiction writer and book critic, Daniel A. Olivas, comes his first collection of poetry, Crossing the Border. These narrative poems delve deeply into the many ways we cross borders of race, culture, language, religion, and privilege. With humor and pathos, Olivas draws from his own life and from the stories of others to serve as a witness to the great variety of experiences that make us human. With grace and eloquence, he invites readers to cross these borders with h...

A modern retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic that addresses issues of belonging and assimilationAn unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial process, maneuvers through a near-future world that both needs and resents him. As the United States president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez.His world expands as he meets her ...

Editor Daniel A. Olivas assembled a cadre of literary luminaries and up-and-coming authors to provide powerful and mesmerizing tales with complex characters that represent the diversity of Southern California. We meet young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor, the newly arrived and the well established. There's a screenwriter pitching an idea and a woman struggling with barrio life, youths trying to avoid gang life and others embracing it. We encounter aggressive journalists, cem...