LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 13

Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas is an astounding debut,
packed with unforgettable characters, vivid landscapes, heartbreak, and
spiritual yearning. Writing for The New York Times, Kyle Minor
captured the book’s power: “This is a variety of beauty too rare in
contemporary literature, a synthesis of material and practice and time
and courage and love that must have cost its writer dearly; it’s not easy
to be so vulnerable so consistently. Quade attempts, page by page, to
give up carefully held secrets, to hold them up to the light so we can get
at the truth beneath, the existential truth. Perhaps this is as close as we
can get to what is sacred in an age in which so many have otherwise
rejected the idea of the sacred.” The National Book Foundation named
Valdez Quade one of its 5 Under 35 for 2014.

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