Edgardo Vega Yunqué

Critical reception of the novel No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again was generally positive. The New York Times Book Review called it "a powerhouse of a novel ... it brings vividly to life, with its polyphony of voices, the simmering ethnic stew of the great American city", but also noted "flat-footed dialogue" and "the characters' belabored internal commentaries", saying "[t]he climax is so ghastly that the book never quite regains its equilibrium."[4] Booklist hailed it as a "hypnotically readable novel--about jazz, about race, about coming-of-age, and above all, about New York ... honest, wrenching emotion, free of all artifice ... Vega Yunqué may just be the Thomas Wolfe of the multicultural twenty-first century."[5]

The Washington Post described it as "a sprawling, iconoclastic, ambitious, stunningly written novel that is part picaresque, part bildungsroman, and part recapitulation of America's last half century ... Like jazz and like America, this novel is fluid, unpredictable, full of verve and smarts. But it is not merely an entertainment. Deeply revisionist, tinged with tragedy and yet doggedly optimistic, this is a work that belongs on the shelf with its epic siblings: E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland."[6]

Newsday found it "juicy, sprawling ... Yunqué succeeds brilliantly." The New York Post called it "a profound novel in the tradition of Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner."[6] The novel also won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and The Washington Post Book of the Year Award.[7]

Vega's reputation grew with The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle. Kirkus Reviews declared the book a "raucous outing ... his characters hold forth in hilarious broken Spanglish ... vivid, wry, tragicomic ... Vega Yunqué is a potent talent."[8] According to Booklist, Vega's "ribald and rambling style reverberates throughout his third novel ... he deftly skewers the politics of academia, the tyranny of mediocrity in contemporary American literature, and America's ongoing prejudice against Puerto Ricans. Vega, unlike many formulaic novels he disparages, definitely has a lot to say."[9] Publishers Weekly announced that "Vega Yunqué has a keen intelligence, an ear for dialogue and a flair for zany passages of magic realism."[10]

His subsequent novel Blood Fugues solidified Vega Yunqué's international reputation as a literary novelist. Publishers Weekly wrote that "Yunqué writes with grace, vividly evoking New York City and American life." Booklist announced "the author is a bravura storyteller with an extraordinary ability to create fascinating, emotion-engaging characters...the novel's subplots involving political terrorism and immigrant resistance to imposed assimilation are absolutely relevant to today's America."[11] Kirkus Reviews noted the book's "distinctive architecture, mystery and suspense," that it was "highly descriptive," and contained "all the features of fine drama."[12]

Vega's short story collections also met with critical acclaim. The San Francisco Chronicle announced that in Mendoza's Dreams Vega "shows us, in twelve funny and personality-laden tales, that there is indeed much more to life in Spanish Harlem than gang warfare; set to the strains of Bernstein and Sondheim." Kirkus Reviews called Mendoza's Dreams "a dozen loving comic fables about the Puerto Rican experience in New York City…well-written, affecting and gritty tales of El Barrio life: reality beginning in dreams.[13] The Village Voice Literary Supplement found Casualty Report to be "brilliantly traced ... a multivocal journey through layers of miscegenated consciousness, intensely bound to a nation that often works like a dream."

Library Journal praised Vega's portrayal of "the consuming struggles and sorrows of Puerto Ricans in New York ... the stories betray a deep concern and love for people living precariously between two worlds. A fine, provocative addition for Latino and large general fiction collections."[14]

• The Comeback. Houston: Arte Público, 1985.
• No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again. New York: Farrar, 2003.
• The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle. Woodstock and New York: Overlook, 2004.
• Blood Fugues. New York: Rayo, HarperCollins, 2005.
• Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak (cancelled in last-minute dispute with publisher). ISBN 978-1-59020-064-3[22]

• Reviewed by Publishers Weekly.[23]
• Reviewed by Kirkus Reviews.[24]
• Reviewed by Library Journal.[25]

• Mendoza's Dreams. Houston: Arte Público, 1987.
• Casualty Report. Houston: Arte Público, 1991.