An NPR Best Book of the Year!

A Southwest Book of the Year!

A Texas Observer Book of the Year!

Stories of working-class Mexican America, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicanx literature.

Gilb's familiar signature intimacy brings us face to face with marginal housing, gritty and exhausting jobs, street people, sex, earthquakes, fouled air, physical handicaps, racism. . . . Some of the stories are sidewinders: at first they indicate layers of something juicy and sweet but turn out to pierce the reader with painful splinters of insight.--Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain and The Shipping News

Dagoberto Gilb's latest cast of characters includes a young family whose exposure to a mysterious cloud of gas alters their lives forever; a high school dropout whose choice to learn the ways of the world from the adults at work leads him into a dangerous dalliance; a former high-rise carpenter who meets up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more. Gilb's distinct narrative voice offers his readers a warm welcome as he peels back the surface of everyday life to seamlessly guide us into realms of of myth and fable.

A unique, unmistakable voice in American fiction, Dagoberto Gilb is also a singular writer of personal and journalistic essays. In A Passing West he casts a penetrating gaze upon the culture and history of the Southwest, Mexican American identity, and his own family.

Gilb has a forceful message for readers: there is a Mexican America, and its culture is the lifeblood of the Southwest United States, which was Mexican land until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The rest of the country, Gilb declares, does not want to know or respect the long history of Mexican America. His mission is to defend and proclaim its beauty and importance.

Ranging from accounts of research in Spain's Archivo General de Indias and the culture of farming corn in Iowa to meditations on Mexican and Mexican American writers, deconstructions of Mexican American food, and the experience of teaching students confused about their own culture and identity, these sharply observed portraits are both thought provoking and entertaining. His parent, his youth and manhood, his new disabled life, and snapshots of Mexico City and Guatemala, California, and Texas--all are unforgettable thanks to Gilb's brilliant vision and style.

Dagoberto Gilb is a powerful and important new talent in American fiction. Fresh, funny, relentless, beautifully crafted, his writing possesses that rare Chekhovian ability to perfectly capture the nuances of ordinary life-and make it resonate with unexpected meaning. The Magic of Blood is his unforgettable first book.

Sonny Bravo is a tender, unusually smart fifteen-year-old who is living with his vivacious mother in a large city where intense prejudice is not just white against black, but also brown. When Sonny's mother, Silvia, suddenly marries an Okie building contractor named Cloyd Longpre, they are uprooted to a small apartment building, Los Flores. As Sonny sweeps its sidewalks, he meets his neighbors and becomes ensnared in their lives: Cindy, an eighteen-year-old druggie who is married and bored; Nica, a cloistered Mexican girl who cares for her infant brother but who is never allowed to leave their unit. The other tenants range from Pink, an albino black man who sells old cars in front of the building, to Bud, a muscled-up construction worker who hates blacks and Mexicans, even while he's married to a Mexican-American woman. Dagoberto Gilb, in arguably his most powerful work yet, has written an inspiring novel about hate, pain, anger, and love that transcends age, race, and time. Gilb's novel displays the fearlessness and wit that have helped make him one of this country's most authentic and original voices.

Before the End, After the Beginning is a personal and honest collection of ten exquisite stories from Dagoberto Gilb. The pieces come in the wake of a stroke Gilb suffered at his home in Austin, Texas, in 2009, and a majority of the stories were written over many months of recovery. The result is a powerful and triumphant collection that tackles common themes of mortality and identity and describes the American experience in a raw, authentic vernacular unique to Gilb.

These ten stories take readers throughout the American West and Southwest, from Los Angeles and Albuquerque to El Paso and Austin. Gilb covers territory familiar to some of his earlier work--a mother and son's relationship in Southern California in the story 'Uncle Rock' or a character looking to shed his mixed up past in 'The Last Time I Saw Junior'--while dealing with themes of mortality and limitation that have arisen during his own illness. Confronting issues of masculinity, sexuality, and mortality, Gilb has recovered and produced what may be his most extraordinary achievement to date.

When he first started writing, Dagoberto Gilb was struggling to survive as a journeyman high-rise carpenter. Years later, he has won widespread acclaim as a crucial and compelling voice in contemporary American letters. Tackling everything from cockfighting to Cormac McCarthy, Gritos collects Gilb's essays and his popular commentaries for NPR's Fresh Air, offering a startling portrait of an artist-and a Mexican-American- working to find his place in both the cloistered literary world and the world at large, to say nothing of his strange and beloved borderland of Texas.

Once an independent nation, Texas has always been proud of its unique culture. The literature of the Lone Star State has long attracted local, regional, and national audiences and critics, yet the state's Mexican American voices have yet to receive the attention they deserve.

Hecho en Tejas is a historic anthology that establishes the canon of Mexican American literature in Texas. With close to one hundred selections chosen, the book reaches back to the sixteenth-century exploration narrative of Texas's first Spanish-speaking writer, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. It features prose by Américo Paredes and Jovita Gonzalez, Rolando Hinojosa and Tomás Rivera, Estela Trambley Portillo, and Sandra Cisneros. Among the poets included in the anthology are Ricardo Sánchez, Carmen Tafolla, Angela de Hoyos, and Abelardo Lalo Delgado. Hecho en Tejas also includes corridos from the turn of the century and verses sung by music legends such as Lydia Mendoza and Santiago Jimenez, Sr., Freddy Fender, and Selena. In addition to these established names, already known across the United States, Hecho en Tejas introduces such younger writers as Christine Granados, Erasmo Guerra, and Tonantzin Canestaro-Garcia, the famous Tejano authors of tomorrow.

In assembling this canonic reader, Dagoberto Gilb has created more than an anthology. Read cover to cover, Hecho en Tejas becomes not only a literary showcase, but also a cultural and historical narrative both for those familiar with Texas Mexicans and for outsiders. Hecho en Tejas is a mosaic portrait of the community, the land and its history, its people's sorrows and joys, anger and humor and pride, what has been assimilated and what will not be.

Mickey Acu a is a man suspended between a vague past and a vaguer future. Emerging from the landscape of the Southwest, buffeted by life and licking his wounds, he moves into a YMCA to wait for a check that is coming to save him and that demands an address. As days and then weeks pass without its arrival, he picks up work - first odd jobs and then shifts at the cash register of the Y - and hangs out with his neighbors, playing handball, drinking coffee, shooting pool, getting drunk, falling in love or lust with women he meets, works with, passes on the street. In the vacuum of the Y, Mickey finds himself becoming the unwitting center of a community starved for human contact and for meaning: Sarge, with his fast-food coupons; Omar, with his drunken rages and obsession with the vanished Lucy; Rosemary, whose abundant physical presence both attracts and repels him. Mickey fights to maintain his distance and his freedom, until the narrative converges abruptly around him in a profound and shocking conclusion.

Dagoberto Gilb is an acknowledged master of the short story, the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a PEN/Faulkner finalist for his debut collection, The Magic of Blood, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his fiction writing. His critically acclaimed collection Woodcuts of Women is now available in paperback and features ten moving and heartbreaking stories of lust, love, and longing among men and women struggling to find their way in the world. Written in Gilb's spare, humid language, each of these haunting stories is crafted with a poetic, aching beauty. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers. The sheer intensity and bravado of [Gilb's] vision make this collection succeed. -- Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review Lonely, tough stories -- stories that force us to confront what's difficult in us, and in the people we love. -- Adrienne Miller, Esquire Gilb's stories read like verbal woodcuts deliberately unrefined and carefully unadorned, clear in their intent but without undue elaboration.... -- Sean Glennon, The Hartford Courant ...Gilb writes of the gritty passions of man for women, grand delusions and tender mercies.... -- Oscar C. Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

From Dodger Stadium to the Astrodome, from the R o Grande Valley to Chicago, from Veracruz to Puerto Rico, from high-school teams to stickball in the streets, from the lessons of fathers to the excited joy of daughters, from massive cheering in the stands at Wrigley Field to the dynamics of family and community echoing on the diamond, these fifteen stories use the sport of baseball to explore geographical, cultural and dream-like spaces that transcend traditional notions of the game and transform it into a universal yet wholly individual experience. Featuring the work of Dagoberto Gilb, Norma Elia Cant , Nelson Denis, Christine Granados, Ren Salda a, Jr., and many more.