TONY COHAN

An American writer and his wife find a new homeand a new lease on lifein the charming sixteenth-century hill town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.When Los Angeles novelist Tony Cohan and his artist wife, Masako, visited central Mexico one winter they fell under the spell of a place where the pace of life is leisurely, the cobblestone streets and sun-splashed plazas are enchanting, and the sights and sounds of daily fiestas fill the air. Awakened to needs they didnt know they had, they returned to California, sold their house and cast off for a new life in San Miguel de Allende. On Mexican Time is Cohans evocatively written memoir of how he and his wife absorb the towns sensual ambiance, eventually find and refurbish a crumbling 250-year-old house, and become entwined in the endless drama of Mexican life. Brimming with mystery, joy, and hilarity, On Mexican Time is a stirring, seductive celebration of another way of lifea tale of Americans who, finding a home in Mexico, find themselves anew.

A captivating, deeply affecting memoir chronicling a journey from a Hollywood childhood as the son of a fading show business figure to a bohemian life in Europe and back to his native state of California, where the author must face the man who had driven him away. Summoned from abroad to attend to the ninety-four-year-old father hes never been close to, writer and musician Tony Cohan finds himself reliving his own peripatetic lifea kaleidoscopic odyssey from Californias sunny postwar promise through the burnt end of the 1960s to the final days of the last century.An engrossing investigation of memory and identity, love and desire, art and fate, Native State vividly portrays the authors attempts to escape the confines of a celebrity-filled, alcoholic family through music, writing, and travel. His descent into the colorful milieus of musical and literary geniuses and lowlifes, divas and crooks, fortune tellers and culture gods in Paris, Tangier, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Francisco, Kyoto, and Los Angeles coalesces into a distinctive, intimate depiction of a pivotal cultural era. Throughout, Cohan brilliantly interweaves and contrasts his past experiences with his present-day reflections on the universal youthful desire to flee home and family, and the simultaneous undertow of origins urging a return. The result is a work that combines unusually rich storytelling with extraordinary literary quality.Poignant, elegantly crafted, and often funny, Native State is an indelible portrait of the artist as a young man, andas son and dying father grope toward acceptancea coming-to-terms with self, family, origins, and the elusive American idea of home.

Tony Cohans On Mexican Time, his chronicle of discovering a new life in the small Mexican mountain town of San Miguel de Allende, has beguiled readers and become a travel classic. Now, in Mexican Days, point of arrival becomes point of departure asfaced with the invasion of the town by tourists and an entire Hollywood movie crew, a magazine editors irresistible invitation, and his own incurable wanderlustCohan undertakes a richer, wider exploration of the country he has settled in. Told with the intimate, sensuous insight and broad sweep that captivated readers of On Mexican Time, Mexican Days is set against a changing world as Cohan encounters surprise and adventure in a Mexico both old and new: among the misty mountains and coastal Caribbean towns of Veracruz; the ruins and resorts of Yucatan; the stirring indigenous world of Chiapas; the markets and galleries of Oaxaca; the teeming labyrinth of Mexico City; the remote Sierra Gorda mountains; the haunted city of Guanajuato; and the evocative Mayan ruins of Palenque. Along the way he encounters expatriates and artists, shady operatives and surrealists, and figures from his past. More than an immensely pleasurable and entertaining travel narrative by one of the most vivid, compelling travel voices to emerge in recent years, Mexican Days is both a celebration of the joys and revelations to be found in this inexhaustibly interesting country and a searching investigation of the Mexican landscape and the grip it is coming to have in the North American imagination.