The Curtain of Trees: Stories

From the middle of the twentieth century comes the latest collection of stories by renowned Chicano writer Alberto Alvaro Rios. The Curtain of Trees re-creates a time and place largely forgotten these days except by grandparents and elders. The stories in this book are part folklore, part oral history, but in full measure literary as they recollect family tales modified by time, telling, and now Ros's graceful perspective.

Set along the Arizona-Mexico border, these stories engage the gulf between Mexican and Chicano, aunt and nephew, sister and sister, sanity and madness. Sometimes the gulf cannot be spanned; sometimes it is nonexistent. The stories are about a land untouched by modernity, where the town crier dresses up as a bear to spread the news, where everybody takes care of the wandering boy named Gustavo, where family lineage means hospitable passage through a distant town.

Like so many family stories told on long afternoons, the tales in The Curtain of Trees are authentic, touching, and fantastically unbelievable.

Alberto Alvaro Rios is Regents' Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe. Among his many books is The Iguana Killer (UNM Press).