Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE SONS OF DEL REY

Alex Espinoza

A multi-generational examination of modern masculinity, The Sons of El Rey is moving, provocative, and constantly in motion, a novel about what we owe each other but also ourselves.

Alex Espinoza's multi-generational epic novel spanning 1970s Mexico City to contemporary Los Angeles follows a family of Luchadores (Mexican Lucha Libre wrestlers) as they contend with forbidden love, family secrets, queerness and machismo. By the American Book Award winning author of Still Water Saints (A B&N Discover Great New Writers Selection) and Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime.

Ernesto and Elena Vega arrive in Mexico City, encouraged by Ernesto's friend Julian where the two men work on a construction site until Ernesto is discovered by a local lucha libre trainer and manager. Soon Ernesto finds fame as El Rey Coyote, but just as his career is at its height, tensions between Julian and Elena reach a breaking point. Ernesto has always known that they were both in love with him, but Elena makes a choice from which they can never recover.

Ernesto and Elena later trade Mexico City for East Los Angeles, where Ernesto is able to open a gym and continue to train others in the art of lucha libre. His son Freddy is now a father himself, and after the pandemic he's forced to close the gym his father built from nothing. Freddy's own son Julian is an adjunct professor adrift, caught up in his own search for professional and romantic fulfillment as a Mexican-American gay man refusing to be defined by stereotypes.

Alex Espinoza an award-winning author and has won a 2009 Margaret Bridgeman Fellowship in Fiction to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a 2014 Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for The Five Acts of Diego León.

Available products
Book Published 2024-06-11 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2024-06-01 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Before the glam drama of drag queens, there existed the flamboyant reign of kings like El Rey, an underdog transformed into a superhero. This is the story of a lucha libre dynasty that battles with ghosts and regrets, heroes and humiliations. It is as much the chronicle of a dying Mexican patriarch as it is about his gay grandson, both hiding behind stoic masks. Ultimately, it is a tale about that country called desire.

From rural Mexico to Ajusco, the outskirts of Mexico City to Los Angeles, their stories unfold in surprising ways.

Tender and revelatory... Espinoza's prose hits with raw emotional power.

The Sons of El Rey pinned me to the mat with its compelling and moving tale of a multigenerational luchador dynasty. Espinoza delivers a deceptively profound unmasking of the human heart.

With shocks of truth and tenderness on every page, The Sons of El Rey is a masterful exploration of a family reckoning with its most sacred secrets. Mesmerizing and unflinching, Espinoza's luchadores will wrestle their way deep into your heart. An absolute knockout of a novel.

The seamlessly interwoven story lines bring each character to vivid life, and Espinoza shines in the lucha libre scenes... This is a knockout. Read more...

The Sons of El Rey has costume and swagger and performance - fantastically so - but beneath that, it's a novel about being a mortal, complicated being in a world less generous even than the Lucha Libre arena. Alex Espinoza has written a story that feels both compact and epic about the many lives we live in the secret cloak of our own skin.

This warm, engaging, and endearing jaunt through the world of lucha libre joyfully grapples and body-slams its way across borders and decades. The Sons of El Rey is classic Alex Espinoza: a smart and smooth novel that pulls you into its big, rich, and human world.