Borderlands: Short Fictions - Softcover

Blake, James Carlos

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802126448 ISBN 13: 9780802126443

Publisher: Grove Press, 2017

Synopsis

The scrublands of South Texas, the warm coastland of the Gulf of Mexico, a cinderblock flophouse near the produce fields of South Florida: all are borderlands of mixed blood and spilled blood, of generations forged in fight, failure, and hope. In this extraordinary collection of short works, the masterful James Carlos Blake, author of In the Rogue Blood and the Wolfe family series of border noirs, journeys from the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of today.

Borderlands begins with an introductory piece of memoir, called The Outsiders,” about Blake’s own straddling of worlds and identities. In the following eight haunting stories, we meet Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza, a powerful landowner reduced to howling at the moon from behind the bars of a mental institution; an illegal immigrant in Florida who must reckon with his emotional turmoil after being robbed by a fellow Mexican; a Texas woman orphaned by disease and desertion, making her way into a violent world of men; and many more who pass through the shadows of the borderlands. Bold, honest, and humane, these pieces represent some of the best writing from one of the most original and authentic voices in contemporary fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

James Carlos Blake is the author of twelve novels, including The House of Wolfe and The Rules of Wolfe. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and a recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for In the Rogue Blood. He was born in Mexico, raised in Texas, and now lives in Arizona.

From Publishers Weekly:

Again mining the territory of bleak lives on the fringes of society, L.A. Times Book Prize-winner Blake (In the Rogue Blood and Red Grass River) has crafted seven short stories and a novella about people surviving in the merciless borderlands dividing Mexico and the U.S. Characters from South Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and Texas are fully sculpted in Blake's visionary dystopia, their struggles neither heroic nor dishonorable. The complexity of border culture is graphically drawn, with its omnipresent threats of la migra, unemployment, bigotry and despair. Blake begins the collection with an engaging and informative introductory memoir, a chronology of his childhood in the borderlands and of his mixed Mexican/Texan heritage. The stories that follow are brutal, stark and horrifying; in "Runaway Horses," a just-widowed man is driven mad when he attempts to deliver just punishment to his wife's rapist and murderer. In another narrative, an illegal immigrant falls in love with an ex-prostitute with three children, but succumbs to his fear of commitment. Female characters suffer violently in these stories, often victims of rape, incest or murder. "Texas Woman Blues" is a searing portrait of hopelessness and horror. Dolores (dolar, pain in Spanish) experiences a lifetime of pain before her 17th birthday. Abandoned by her father, who ends up in prison, on her mother's death she is sent to live with relatives and is raped by her uncle. When she finally bolts free, the cycle of victimization expands into a bleak and unforgettable chronicle of dead-end options. Blake writes with a fearless precision and a ruthless sensibility, his prose is spare and tough, and his descriptions detailed and cinematic. This is gritty, raw, bare-knuckled fiction, blazing with an extraordinary kind of violence, and certainly not for the faint of heart.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0802126448
• ISBN 13: 9780802126443
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272