Understanding John Rechy

"María DeGuzmán gives meaningful shape to John Rechy's irrepressible corpus. Her deft account situates the writer's synesthetic prose, his embrace of sexual and social outcasts within U.S. conformism, as well as his contribution to women-centered narratives and the Chicana feminist canon. DeGuzmán underscores Rechy's experimental methods given to transform experience into visionary novels, true fictions, and mixed-media memoirs into works imperative for understanding our nation in the present."—Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

"Understanding John Rechy is a breathtakingly comprehensive study of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. DeGuzmán's book will quickly take its place as the primary authoritative study on Rechy's work, and it will unquestionably prove invaluable and enlightening to a wide array of readers."—Richard T. Rodríguez, University of California, Riverside