Llegaron los hippies / And the Hippies Came

by Manuel Abreu Adorno

Flip version; the book reads through to the middle in Spanish, flip it over, and it read through to the middle in English. To read "And the Hippies Came" is to find yourself surrounded by names and places that became history, but it will also surprise you with the sheer force of its stories and conflicts. During his time, Abreu was eulogized by Julio Cortazar, he wrote with his ear affixed to his era and in his pen there was a pulse of pop culture that gave immediacy to everything he wrote. It is this that makes the fact that he has been lost to memory since he departed from this world all the more inexplicable and inexcusable. In this, his quintessential first book of twelve short stories, Manuel Abreu Adorno explores the hallucinating dimensions of life through the perspective of different social classes. Manuel Abreu Adorno's forgotten legacy is revived with this re-edition of his book of short stories, "And the Hippies Came", published originally in 1978 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The book, which has been out of print for nearly three decades will be made available for the first time ever in this edition from 7Vientos.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short story collection, only about 110 pages but let me tell you they are dense as hell. Half the book is in the original Spanish, the other half translated into English. This author really uses language in an interesting way, this book would best be enjoyed by a person fluent in both languages.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dig my review all up on here: http://www.rochester.edu/College/tran...

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Junot Diaz DEFINITELY checked out Adorno for his consumer-culture-ridden second-person stories of Latin American life. Right Junot? Call me. Anyway...get this book if only for the GORGEOUS binding!

[Tati · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puerto Rican literature! The Latin American Boom! The Beat Generation of the Hispanic World!

The first story was by far my favorite, written at a time of political tumult in Puerto Rico it is a commentary on colonization. Oh how the hippies love to come to the beach, to love, to look and ask for peace and tell us how Mother Nature is within us all. And how they hate to leave with the same values.

The English and Spanish introductions were written by the same person, but the Spanish introduction offers so so much more. More political commentary, more background into Manual brew Adorno, the Latin American Boom, Puerto Rican Nationalism, generation trauma, and provides a nuance that was not given in the English introduction.

[Danny Lynn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book should be sold as poetry. It's impossible to read as a story. I wanted to love it. And i couldn't even wade through the run-on sentences and paragraphs that went on for pages.