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Product Description: "Autopsy of an Engine is the most surprising love story I've read all year. The workers in the Cadillac factory who populate this book may not be related, but in the hands of the amazing Lolita Hernandez they become one moving multicultural family. Writing with tenderness and humor she gives voice to the piston crew and the timing chain women, the foremen and the chassis line. Some of these stories just break your heart. I stayed up all night reading and for weeks afterward Abbie, who brought a ghost factory back to life, haunted my dreams. This is a passionate cry from the factory floor, a story you can't forget from a voice that has not been heard before."—Ruth Reichl

"In her account of the closing of the Clark Street facility of the Cadillac Motor Company, Lolita Hernandez positions herself at the intersection of journalism and literature. Here is not only a report from the assembly line, brilliantly told. This is also a talented writer's record of loss, a poet's meditation from inside the working place."—Richard Rodriguez

Full of magic and soul, these twelve stories bring to life the spirits that populated Detroit’s Clark Street Cadillac factory until its last smokestack was airlifted out in 1993. Each story is a tribute to the grit, passion, and bravado that transformed Detroit into the Motor City and the Cadillac into America’s premier luxury car. They are also a heartbreaking testament to the decline of the auto industry and the loss of jobs that turned Motown inside out, creating a haunted landscape of abandoned factories and decaying boulevards.

Told from the diverse perspective of unionized assembly line workers and management, janitors and engineers, payroll clerks and retirees, these stories capture the raw and vibrant hum of humanity that found its way into every piston, spark plug, and belt, even as the last Fleetwood rolled off the line, its engine purring into the Detroit night. They are about family, friendship, resilience, loyalty, and letting go, but mostly they are about the dreams and magic created in the strangest city of all— Detroit’s last Cadillac factory.

In a universal song of labor and industry, this sensational debut collection establishes Lolita Hernandez as an inspiring new voice in contemporary literature. In her stories, you will meet America—full of love, loss, pride, sweat, dreams, music, comfort food, and engine oil—and, in them, you will recognize yourself.