“Book Descriptions: From a stunning new Latino voice, Myth of the Self Made Man is a wildly inventive story—part sci-fi, with echoes of Get Out—that plunges us into a brave new American landscape.
More than a hundred years into the future, as the US approaches its 400th anniversary, Tomas, a young graduate student, searches for the real identity of one of the cyborgs that maintained American homes. He has been haunted for years by an audio clip of a cyborg named Felipe and is intent on writing Felipe’s biography. In the clip, Felipe can only recite that he was made in America, but Tomas must find out: where was the Self-made Man really from?
In the National Archives, Tomas uncovers a trove of articles, depositions, and interviews about many other cyborgs, boys from El Salvador and Guatemala kidnapped, detained, and reengineered at a monolithic New England company.
As we follow Tomas’s determined investigation into these lives, their voices echo through our own past, present, and future with unsettling clarity.