John Manuel Arias Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

John Manuel Arias is a published Costa Rican American author and poet. He identifies as queer.

He is known for his first fictional book, Where There Was Fire. The 2023 release was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick and a Good Morning America Buzz Pick.

John’s writing has been published in different literary magazines. These include the Journal, Sixth Finch, and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry.

He is a Canto Mundo fellow as well as an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop.

John has had his poetry and prose published in a variety of places, including PANK, The Kenyon Review, Akashic Books, and The Rumpus.

John has lived in many different places, including Brooklyn, San Jose, Costa Rica, and Washington D.C.

His book brought lots of cues from other authors into the work. These include Mόnica de la Torre and Arundhati Roy. The author wanted to play with language and move the reader forward in a way that was joyous.

John Manuel Arias is also an associative poet. Some of those associations came out in his first book. He also abandoned linear time and thought that he could create anchor images to help the reader go from different scenes or different chapters to the other. He takes the reader through and has them jump through time, since histories and life do not necessarily occur in a straight line.

The author also attempted to get rid of a lot of Spanish words or elements in the book unless it was necessary. The book happens in Spanish and is set in Costa Rica, but is written in English due to the simple fact that the author has their own comfort level with the language. Some Spanish words are featured in the story, and frequently appear because they can’t be translated to other Spanish speakers.

The author describes his first story as being set on a banana plantation in the sixties that is owned by the American Fruit Company. In the middle of a cover-up, the plantation burns to the ground in the night. The future of a family of women in Costa Rica goes along with it. Cut to three decades later with the remaining matriarch, who reconnects with her estranged daughter during a hurricane to rebuild their future.

Arias also incorporates magical realism, which is a natural part of life for many people in different countries, and sees it as an interesting tool to move the story along. In addition, tropes such as ghosts are used in magical realism as a way to show what was been erased, bring something up that was buried, to mythologize what was forgotten.

The family in the debut also can be seen a lot in his own family. A lot was borrowed from reality due to the characters being so loved in his own life that he had to feature them in his story. He notes this in the acknowledgments for the book.

Arias also did a lot of research for his debut fictional book. The book is seen as ‘speculative historical fiction’ in his eyes, since many of the horrible things that these fruit companies did happened. The author wanted to created in the AFC a combination of what the companies were actually capable of in real life and what they had managed to do and not get sued, and acknowledges that they also have some of the most powerful lawyers in the world.

Arias also features quotes from Eunice Odio at the beginning of the story. He notes that he sees her as a ‘fascinating’ human, as from another world and doing things ‘far beyond her years’. She was a female poet in mid-century Costa Rica who was shut out by her peers. She’s been forgotten some in Costa Rica, but has developed a new cult following, of which John Manuel says that he is a member.

I’d Rather Sink! is the first poetry book from this author. Released in 2017, grab a copy of this book and see why people like Eduardo C. Corral (author of Slow Lightning) are saying that these poems are orchestrations of the lyrical and the experimental and calls the linguistic arrangements ‘visually striking’ and ‘deftly scored’.

Ruben Quesada (author of Next Extinct Mammal) advises readers that they should drink this collection in while reading it no matter where you are in the world. The poems of this author will ‘leave you thirsting for more’ and he compares the poems to that of Anaïs Nin or Henry Miller, calling them ‘visceral and imaginative’.

Where There Was Fire is the first fictional novel from John Manuel Arias. This is a wonderful debut story that goes into tragedy and shows the story of a Costa Rican family who have to contend with a life-changing event that sets them on a different course forever.

The year is 1968, and the place is Costa Rica. A huge fire has broken out at the most lucrative banana plantation that the American Fruit Company owns there. It appears to be no coincidence as the fire also happens to burn up all the evidence that a huge cover-up has taken place.

Just like that, Teresa Cepeda Valverde sees her future and that of her family forever change. It has been now twenty-seven years and Teresa is doing whatever she can to try and pick up the pieces of what has happened along with her daughter, Lyra.

Lyra is estranged from her mother and wants nothing to do with her. However, she still wants to find out what happened and what went down that night. She is dealing with a husband who has gone missing and her mother’s bitter ghost. Haunted by Amarga and her vanished spouse, Teresa is doing what she can to deal with the past.

What ends up happening is the story of a daughter and a mother attempting to try and forgive what they don’t fully understand, as well as the mystery at the center of one family’s break. With omens, ancestral spirits, the power of nature, love, loss, machismo, labor, jealousy, chaos and more, this is as much a story of Costa Rica as it is the fictional tale of one family and their attempt to make it in this world.