Daniel A. Olivas Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Children's Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Daniel A. Olivas is an American attorney and author.

He grew up close to downtown Los Angeles, the grandson of immigrants from Mexico and the middle of five children in his family. He graduated from Loyola High School and then graduated from Stanford University with a BA in English literature and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of California in Los Angeles.

He also encountered Susan Formaker, a law student at UCLA. They got married in 1986 and share a son together. He’s practiced as a deputy and a supervising deputy attorney general as well as a senior assistant attorney general with the California Department of Justice since 1990. Before that, he was in private practice.

He wrote several legal essays, articles and book reviews before turning to fiction, writing for the Los Angeles Daily Journal. In 1998, his first short story was published in Rivers Edge, a literary journal from the University of Texas-Pan American.

The first book from this author was titled The Courtship of Maria Rivera Peňa, which was a novella released in 2000 and currently out of print. It’s based loosely on the migration of his grandparents in the twenties from Mexico to Los Angeles.

From there, he came out with three more collections of short stories. They all came out from Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. He published another collection in 2017 and released The King of Lighting Fixtures from the University of Arizona Press.

Her collection How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories came out in 2022 from the University of Nevada Press. It was reviewed positively by BuzzFeed, which noted that the author has ‘strong Chicano characters’ in this stories and called the book ‘a timely retrospective’ from ‘an important voice in Latinx literature’.

A review in the Alta Journal said that the author was ‘prompted to tragedy’ due to the pandemic and his father’s passing. Now Olivas goes back to decades of writing to come up with a collection of stories that have been new as well as previously published.

His novel The Book of Want came out in 2011 from the University of Arizona Press. The novel came out in the tradition of the magical realist. But it also has postmodern elements that include sections with the characters being interviewed about being in the story itself, as well as text messages and a brief play.

His book Chicano Frankenstein was acquired by Forest Avenue Press in 2023. The date set for publication was 2024 and shows that the book deals with issues of assimilation and belonging through a modern retelling of the classic by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. He was also interviewed on NPR’s Code Switch podcast where he went over the inspiration for the book in the 2020 midterm elections’ anti-immigrant political rhetoric.

The Los Angeles Time published six of his children’s stories between the time period of 2003 to 2010. Benjamin and the Word was one of those stories that was republished as a bilingual picture book.

The author has also worked as an editor, too. He has edited a volume from Bilingual Press in 2008 called Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature. This is where sixty years of LA fiction from Latino writers were compiled, collecting some of the works from the best-known Latino writers in literature today.

He has also edited The Coiled Serpent and was a co-editor of The New Oeste book series from the University of Nevada Press.

For his work in nonfiction, Olivas wrote his first nonfiction book titled Things We Do Not Talk About. It came out in 2014 from San Diego State University Press. The book collects essays that have appeared in a variety of publications that discuss a variety of topics and includes various interviews.

Olivas also has a book of poems that came out in 2017 titled Crossing the Border: Collected Poems. He is also a playwright and wrote the play Waiting for Godinez in 2019, which also was inspired by Waiting for Godot. It was picked to be part of the 2020 Playwrights’ Arena’s Summer Reading Series, as well as The Road Theatre’s Twelfth Annual Summer Playwrights Festival, the Garry Marshall Theatre’s New Works Festival, and premiered in Sacramento, California on April 5, 2024.

He was also picked to adapt his book The Book of Want to a play in 2020 by the Circle X Theatre Co.’s Evolving Playwrights Group. His live staged play Waiting premiered in July 2021 with Playwrights’ Arena.

Chicano Frankenstein is a 2024 novel from Daniel A. Olivas. This tells the Frankenstein story in a new way, focusing on issues of assimilation and what it means to belong.

When a paralegal is brought to life again through a controversial process, he finds that he’s in a world of the near future that needs him while simultaneously resenting him. The president of the United States is putting out rhetoric against reanimation while companies in the pharmaceutical world are taking in insane levels of profits.

Then he falls for Faustina Godinez, a lawyer. His world gets even bigger as he encounters her friends and family. Ultimately he is more on a course than ever to find out the history of his first life, which was erased during the process of being reanimated. Read this incredible book to catch every moment of a genius retelling that is completely compelling.

My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions is a collection from Daniel A. Olivas. These are a variety of stories that have been published before with five new ones included. The stories are about love and explore the machinations of people who want to be treasured and appreciated.

Readers are going to find characters who look for things and plan and deal with various settings that can be boring or fantastical. A man gives his heart over to his wife to keep it in a wooden box. A woman goes to New Mexico on a trip, a man who gets a roommate who might be imaginary, and more. Funny and interesting, check out this book and absorb all of these unique stories from Daniel A. Olivas!