San Antonio Current | RoberTO ONTIVEROS | Books | AAN.org

Halloween brings three terrifying tomes to die fornew

Due to social obligations that include handing out gift coupons and checking apples for needles, Halloween is perhaps best handled by just being haunted by a book.

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 10-26-2012 | Fiction

Tags: Justin Cronin

A Triad of Intangible Territoriesnew

Unless dealing with outright metaphysics, much nonfiction is mere map-making, stencil patterns, or instruction. And it really has something to do with the approach: how much song is given to each subject.

San Antonio Current | RoberTO ONTIVEROS | 09-16-2012 | Books

Turbulence undergirds offerings by these Texas authorsnew

Never let anyone try to tell you what a Texas writer is supposed to be. Here are three Texans that cover everything from the skin trade to cautionary schoolyard YA fiction.

San Antonio Current | ROBERTO ONTIVEROS | 07-20-2012 | Fiction

Fill your head with candy, Pac-Man, and Crumbnew

The summer months should be a time to seek out necessary shade and cool off with a hot new book title.

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 05-17-2012 | Nonfiction

Tags: Kate Hopkins, Sweet Tooth book, The Bittersweet History of Candy

'Burn Down' delivers true American Gothicnew

The discomforting cliché that out of bad pain comes good comedy — an assurance that has, in some form or other, been made by acerbic jokers from Mark Twain to Bernie Mac — is nothing to scoff at.

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 04-02-2012 | Nonfiction

Tags: drama, memoir, pain, comedy, Kambri Crews Villard, dark comedy

Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantasticnew

Ever read a poem about a guy who emotionally abuses a mannequin and leaves her silicon heart broken in a dumpster?

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 02-16-2012 | Fiction

Tags: Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, Three Messages and a Warning

'The Third Reich' by Roberto Bolañonew

A few years after George Steiner penned an essay about Hitler's architect Albert Speer for the New Yorker and New Wave sellouts Spandau Ballet cracked the top 40 by singing songs about truth and precious metals, an obscure Chilean poet who once swore he'd never write novels began work on a beach comedy called The Third Reich that he promptly placed in a drawer.

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 02-16-2012 | Fiction

Sandra Cisneros' Impact on Latino literaturenew

As nearly everyone now knows, Sandra Cisneros — the oft-times indigenously attired author who founded the Macondo Writers' Workshop here in 1998 and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation two years later — is done with San Antonio.

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 02-16-2012 | Author Profiles & Interviews

A Child's View From a Hot Place Fails to Escape the Pitnew

Hell, despite what Sartre, said about it being “other people,” is usually depicted as a lonely place, either the cascading trauma of lost relations in Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, or the clammy cochlea of torture tunnels in the those too-loud Pinhead movies inspired by his quite novella.

San Antonio Current | Roberto Ontiveros | 10-27-2011 | Fiction