Deep Down Dark is the novel that inspired the film The 33 starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Cote de Pablo and Antonio Banderas.

When the San Jose mine collapsed outside of Copiapo, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. After the disaster, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hector Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales, and in Deep Down Dark, he brings them to haunting, visceral life. We learn what it was like to be imprisoned inside a mountain, understand the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and experience the awe of working in such a place-underground passages filled with danger and that often felt alive. A masterwork of narrative journalism and a stirring testament to the power of the human spirit, The 33: Deep Down Dark captures the profound ways in which the lives of everyone involved in the catastrophe were forever changed.

A Finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award
A Finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Selected for NPR’s Morning Edition Book Club

A new audiobook by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.

“Latino” is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Héctor Tobar’s personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of “Latino” as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about “illegals” and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.

Investigating topics that include the US-Mexico border “wall,” Frida Kahlo, urban segregation, gangs, queer Latino utopias, and the emergence of the cartel genre in TV and film, Tobar journeys across the country to expose something truer about the meaning of “Latino” in the twenty-first century.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Previously published as Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stroies of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free.

The novel that inspired the film The 33 starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Cote de Pablo and Antonio Banderas.

When the San Jose mine collapsed outside of Copiapo, Chile, in August 2010, it trapped thirty-three miners beneath thousands of feet of rock for a record-breaking sixty-nine days. After the disaster, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hector Tobar received exclusive access to the miners and their tales, and in Deep Down Dark, he brings them to haunting, visceral life. We learn what it was like to be imprisoned inside a mountain, understand the horror of being slowly consumed by hunger, and experience the awe of working in such a place-underground passages filled with danger and that often felt alive. A masterwork of narrative journalism and a stirring testament to the power of the human spirit, The 33: Deep Down Dark captures the profound ways in which the lives of everyone involved in the catastrophe were forever changed.

A Finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award
A Finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Selected for NPR’s Morning Edition Book Club

The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves–a twenty-first-century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity

With The Barbarian Nurseries, H+(r)ctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.

Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household–one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing–unless you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central LA in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house–except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Se+#or Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew.

With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience–as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno–to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.

“Narrator Pabon delivers a top-notch performance of Tobar’s masterful blend of fiction and
nonfiction…Pabon’s understated delivery allows listeners to make their own discoveries in this truly unique and intriguing story.” — Booklist

In The Last Great Road Bum, Hector Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times.

Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Hector Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum.

A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador–a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism.

The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live–a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Hector Tobar could pull off.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD