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Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard College. His writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn. There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven is his debut.
Ruben Reyes's website
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What prompted you to write this book?
Before I conceptualized an entire collection, I was just trying to teach myself how to write a short story. The bulk of the stories were drafted after the summer of 2018, a brutal couple of months for Central American migrants under the Trump administration. Eventually, I realized all my stories were circling one central question: How can fiction help us make sense of the real-life dystopia Central American immigrants face every day? There is a Rio Grande in Heaven is my way of working through that question.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The earliest story, about a Salvadoran colony on Mars, was drafted in the summer of 2016, which means the book took about eight years to complete. Writing my first book also involved figuring out what kind of writer I wanted to be, so I experimented a lot. Some of these experiments made it to the final manuscript, other were cut.
I always knew I wanted to write weird, speculative stories about Salvadoran immigrants, so that remained consistent, but I think the stories range so widely—in both genre and form—because writing the book was an exercise in self-discovery. That's ...
Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, in addition to a... (more)
If you enjoyed:
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven
Try:
Martyr!
by Kaveh Akbar
Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven
Try:
If I Survive You
by Jonathan Escoffery
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