Amnesia in a Republican County

Silver Mendez, veteran Chicano poet, is always looking for a way to guarantee himself three square meals a day and a roof over his head. As this latest account of Silver's misadventures begins, our hero reaches for a typewriter on a high shelf. When it comes crashing down on his head he is knocked unconscious. He awakes with no idea where he is or why. Soon he discovers that he is in his office at a Baptist college in the Simi Valley of southern California. Silver has become a professor of English! Moreover, as he soon discovers to his horror, he is having an affair with the wife of the college president. And someone seems to be selling drugs on campus and Silver is somehow involved.In his previous Silver Mendez novels Gary Soto has blended comedy and pathos, but this new book is a sharp-eyed romp, an academic comedy about politics and political correctness, which is nonexistent at Silver's school. Gary Soto is an equal opportunity satirist. No academic is immune to his sense of the ridiculous, and neither is anyone else.