Audiobooks narrated by Johnny Rey Diaz

A Book of Balance: Kogi Wisdom for a Good Life and Thriving Earth

Lucas Buchholz (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz, TBD (Narrator)

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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023

Award-winning writer, columnist, and journalists Carl Zimmer selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2022. “What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us. From a hopeful portrait of a future for people with Alzheimer’s disease, to a fascinating exploration of the rise of nearsightedness in children, to the heroic story of a herd of cows that evaded a hurricane, these selections reveal how science and nature shape our everyday lives. With tremendous intelligence, clarity, and insight, this anthology offers an expansive look at where we are and where we are headed. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023 includes JESSICA CAMILLE AGUIRRE • VANESSA GREGORY • SABRINA IMBLER FERRIS JABR • MARION RENAULT • ELIZABETH SVOBODA NATALIE WOLCHOVER • SARAH ZHANG and others

Carl Zimmer, Jaime Green (Author), Em Grosland, Jeena Yi, Johnny Rey Diaz, Katharine Chin, Nikki Massoud, Shahjehan Khan (Narrator)

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The Best American Food Writing 2023

A collection of the year’s top food writing, selected by prolific food writer and author of How to Cook Everything Mark Bittman. 'In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture. From the link between salt and sex, to Syrian refugees transforming ancient Turkish food traditions, to the FDA’s crusade on alternative non-dairy milk options, to Black farmers in Arkansas seeking justice, the scope of these essays spans nearly every aspect of our society. This anthology offers an entertaining and poignant look at how food shapes our lives and how food writing shapes our culture. THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2023 INCLUDES JAYA SAXENA • LIGAYA MISHAN • MARION NESTLE TOM PHILPOTT • WESLEY BROWN • ALICIA KENNEDY CAROLINE HATCHETT • AMY LOEFFLER and others

Mark Bittman, Silvia Killingsworth (Author), Anthony Rey Perez, Carolina Hoyos, Chanté Mccormick, Dylan Moore, Elyse Dinh, Johnny Rey Diaz, Justin Chien, Nikki Massoud, Terrence Kidd, Will Tulin (Narrator)

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Shame the Stars

Eighteen-year-old Joaquín del Toro’s future looks bright. With his older brother in the priesthood, he’s set to inherit his family’s Texas ranch. He’s in love with Dulceña—and she’s in love with him. But it’s 1915, and trouble has been brewing along the US-Mexico border. On one side, the Mexican Revolution is taking hold; on the other, Texas Rangers fight Tejano insurgents, and ordinary citizens are caught in the middle. As tensions grow, Joaquín is torn away from Dulceña, whose father’s critical reporting on the Rangers in the local newspaper has driven a wedge between their families. Joaquín’s own father insists that the Rangers are their friends, and refuses to take sides in the conflict. But when their family ranch becomes a target, Joaquín must decide how he will stand up for what’s right. Shame the Stars is a rich reimagining of Romeo and Juliet set in Texas during the explosive years of Mexico’s revolution. Filled with period detail, captivating romance, and political intrigue, it will bring Shakespeare’s classic to life in an entirely new way.

Guadalupe Garcia Mccall (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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Nobody's Pilgrims

No Country for Old Men meets Contagion in this story of three teens on the run, carrying a great menace, and chased by a greater evil. Three teenagers are traveling northeast in a navy blue Ford pickup. Turi fled his abusive family at the border to see the beautiful New England landscape he’s always dreamed about. Arnulfo is undocumented and wants only to find someplace safe and quiet. Molly seeks a new life far away from her nowhere Missouri town. Turi and Arnulfo are best friends. Molly and Turi are falling in love. But for all their innocence, violence follows the trio at every turn. The mean viejito who owns the truck wants it back. The narco who hid a deadly shipment in the truck really, really wants it back. And the imperturbable hitman the narco sends after the trio will kill anyone who stands in his way. Turi, Arnulfo, and Molly might outrun the carnage that’s stalking them … but they can’t elude the chaos they’re carrying, no matter how far they go. A literary novel with the propulsion of a thriller, a genre joyride written in the prose of a master, Nobody’s Pilgrims both offers and questions the possibility of escape—a great American road trip with a gritty frontera twist.

Sergio Troncoso (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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The Immortal Boy

Francisco Montaña Ibáñez (Author), Ana Daniela Osorio, Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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The Immortal Boy: Spanish Edition

Francisco Montaña Ibáñez (Author), Ana Daniela Osorio, Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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The Good Lessons

The Good Lessons 'A necessary read for anyone serious about personal transformation and peace in our communities.' Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and author of 'Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.' A provocative, inspiring, and highly original take on the education and healing of troubled, alienated and gang involved youth. These are beautiful, harrowing stories of transformation as both a high-crime urban and a reservation Indian community decide to throw out convention and rethink what it means, and what it takes, to raise their most alienated and difficult children. Raised in East Los Angeles and also a professional musician, Hernandez-Sametier has been a teacher, counselor and principal in some of the most difficult urban and rural school environments across the U.S. and Indian Country. He recently served as a therapist for high-trauma, unaccompanied minors detained by U.S. immigration. In 2006, he was honored as the 'national educator of the year' by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education.

Arturo Hernandez-Sametier (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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Shelter

In this rare account from within ICE detention facilities, fourteen children are followed from their arrest by U.S. Border Patrol to the day they exit facilities for unaccompanied minors. Preschoolers and teenagers, the kids offer a range of evocative backstories: a deaf and mute fifteen-year-old Mayan girl; a teen from India who has walked three thousand miles; a Guatemalan girl who has escaped domestic slavery and is on the run with her young siblings. Each child offers an account of their chaotic journey from Guatemala, India, Honduras or Mexico, and the situation that drove them to enter the U.S. illegally. We get an intimate view of their long, difficult quest for release to U.S. relatives and a rare, first-hand view of daily life within U.S detention shelters. The author, a therapist within a major children's detention facility, offers a vivid, and often surprising, first-hand description of daily life within our immigration shelters; the complicated, often heroic efforts of shelter workers; and the processes and politics that decide if a child is deported or allowed to join family. In the epilogue, the author explains that due to Homeland Security restrictions, sharing information about the internal workings of migrant shelters forfeits any future employment. The author believes this to be the principal reason there are no other published accounts from within facilities for unaccompanied minors.

Arturo Hernandez-Sametier (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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The Music of Jimmy Ojotriste

A lush, nostalgic barrio romance reminiscent of Marquez and Allende. An orphaned boy with long hair to cover scars and a bewitched glass eye is raised by a collective of mariachis in East Los Angeles. Since childhood, Jimmy Ojotriste (sad eye) has busked the teeming Mexican restaurants of the Eastside with violinist Ray Chin and green-eyed tenor Victor Salcedo. At twenty, all three boys are in love, stuck, and one of them is dying. What follows is a lyrical quest through the Latin music underground of Los Angeles that will eventually take them from Tijuana to Andalusia. Steeped in the music of mariachi and flamenco, and the “brujeria”, sensuality, and street life of disco era Los Angeles, Jimmy Ojotriste is an intense, musical romp through a vanishing world in the company of characters you will miss dearly when it’s over. “Gave me the feeling of reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first time.” Amazon Review “Romantic in the biggest sense of the word.” Goodreads Review “Lovely novel about young mariachis finding their place in the world, soaked in a vibrant sense of place and time. Somehow captures that feeling of being twenty and seeing the world spread before you in a way I've rarely seen portrayed well.” Goodreads Review “Wrapped in the sights and sounds of 1970s Los Angeles, vibrant and nostalgic, Hernandez explores the complex intersections of race, love, poverty and coming of age…and through it all we are serenaded by his lyrical descriptions of the life and music of the mariachi.” Tate Hurvitz, Phd. Grossmont College Literature Dept. “…Definitely for music lovers and romantics. Lyrical scenes - odd and memorable characters. Anyone interested in flamenco, mariachi, and Hispanic culture will be immersed. I learned of the book through 'Las Comadres' a Latino lit reading group at our bookstore.” Goodreads Review

Arturo Hernandez-Sametier (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez: A Novel

In the 1950s, tensions remain high in the border town of La Frontera. Penny loafers and sneakers clash with boots and huaraches. Bowling shirts and leather jackets compete with guayaberas. Convertibles fend with motorcycles. Yet amidst the discord, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist’s daughter. But as they’ll soon find out, their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known. Thirty years after their first fateful encounter, Fulgencio Ramirez, RPh, is conducting his daily ritual of reading the local obituaries in his cramped pharmacy office. After nearly a quarter of a century of waiting, Fulgencio sees the news he’s been hoping for: his nemesis, the husband of Carolina Mendelssohn, has died. A work of magical realism, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez weaves together the past and present as Fulgencio strives to succeed in America, break a mystical family curse, and win back Carolina’s love after their doomed youthful romance. Through enchanting language and meditations about the porous nature of borders—cultural, geographic, and otherworldly—The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez offers a vision of how the past has divided us, and how the future could unite us.

Rudy Ruiz (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz, Rudy Ruiz (Narrator)

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Rain of Gold

Rain of Gold is a true-life saga of love, family and destiny that pulses with bold vitality, sweeping from the war-ravaged Mexican mountains of Pancho Villa’s revolution to the days of Prohibition in California. It all began when Villaseñor’s maternal grandmother sat him down in their little home in the barrio of Carlsbad, California, gave him sweet bread and told him the story of their past. Of his mother Lupe, the most beautiful girl in the whole village who was only a child when Villa’s men came shooting into their canyon. And of his father Juan and his family, reduced to rags and starvation as they sought refuge across the border, where they believed that endless opportunity awaited. Lupe and Juan met and fell in love in California, but they found that the doors to the Promised Land were often closed to those from south of the border. His father was forced to take the law into his own hands, in spite of his wife’s objections. With love and humor, Villaseñor shares this passionate love story that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit. An all-American story of struggle and success, Rain of Gold focuses on three generations of Villaseñor’s kin, their spiritual and cultural roots back in Mexico, their immigration to California and overcoming poverty, prejudice and economic exploitation. It is the warm-hearted and spirited account of the wily, wary and persevering forebears of Victor Villaseñor.

Victor Villaseñor (Author), Johnny Rey Diaz (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Johnny Rey Diaz