Before the End, After the Beginning
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Ten "stark, realistic" short stories from the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author 'told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose" (The Boston Globe).
Dagoberto Gilb wrote most of the stories in Before the End, After the Beginning while he recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2009. The result is a powerful and triumphant volume that tackles common themes of identity, mortality, and the physical limitations which arose during his own illness.
Taking readers throughout the American West and Southwest, from Los Angeles and Albuquerque to El Paso and Austin, these ten stories cover territory close to Gilb's heart—a mother and son's relationship in Southern California in the story 'Uncle Rock' or a man looking to shed his chaotic past in 'The Last Time I Saw Junior'—while describing the American experience in his raw, inimitable style.
With this new collection, Gilb offers what may be his most extraordinary achievement to date with "an authenticity that's unimpeachable" (San Antonio Express News).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PEN/Hemingway Award winner Gilb's 10 new tales, many written as the author recovered from a 2009 stroke, take on family ties, poverty, labor, and prejudice at the country's borders, but defy racial and geographic boundaries even when they provide the principal conflict. In "Hacia Teotitl n," a Mexican immigrant raised in L.A. struggles to resolve his dual identity; "Uncle Rock" finds an Americanized child trying to bond with his mother's culturally na ve boyfriend. Financial divisions abound, as in "Willows Village," where the shiftless Guillermo visits a wealthy relation, and the wonderful "Cheap," the prescience of whose subjects immigration policy and underpaid laborers is rivaled only by the explicit address of Arizona's immigration crackdown in "To Document." And yet the most affecting story may be "please, thank you" for its depiction of a proud man recovering from a stroke and working his way back into language, as Gilb himself was forced to do. This new collection (after The Flowers) demonstrates that the author has more power than ever in addressing the conditions and contradictions of being split across cultures, and reminds us that every American, native or immigrant, is the product of a society that must learn to share or risk losing its founding graces.
