Woodcuts of Women
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
These ten stories of "intensity and bravado" by the acclaimed Chicano author explore love, lust, and longing among people struggling to find their way (Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review).
Featuring characters of Mexican American heritage, each of these haunting stories is crafted with Gilb's quintessentially spare yet evocative language and explores the lives of men and women at odds with each other. Steeped in an ethos of regimented gender roles, the men in these stories see the women in their lives as little more than woodcuts—crude variations of their actual complexity; symbols of seduction, mystery, and power that will ultimately bring about their undoing.
At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers.
"Lonely, tough stories—stories that force us to confront what's difficult in us, and in the people we love." —Esquire
"The gritty passions of men for women—the grand delusions and tender mercies—are the jukebox songs playing through the 10 stories of Gilb's 'Woodcuts of Women.'" —San Francisco Chronicle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mexican-American men and women in pursuit of sex and spiritual sustenance inhabit the 10 stories featured in Gilb's second collection, set mostly in El Paso, Tex. Lucky in love but unwilling to settle down, the male protagonists are possessed of a collective roving eye and seek out the prototypical mysterious female strangerDin department stores, on the street, in airport lounges. Whether consumed by their surroundingsDlike R. Fernandez, in "Hueco," who lives in an entirely blue apartmentDor by passion, they are often left drained and despondent by their adventures. In "Shout," a brief but intense account of domestic disquietude, a beer-guzzling husband, home after a long day's work, vents his rage. "The Pillows" tells of itinerant George, who crashes at a high school buddy's apartment only to be overwhelmed by the pathos evident in his friend's grimy linens. Another drifter, Willie, ends up house-sitting for a gringa, Irene, in "About Tere Who Was in Palomas." Obsessed with thoughts of his ex-girlfriend, he ignores Irene's advances. In the best stories, the conflicts sparked are left hauntingly unresolved; in others, the lack of resolution seems rote and empty. As the book's title suggests, outlines or crude impressions of women are often all the men are capable of seeing in these elliptical tales. Gilb's fluent, colloquial prose, with its frequent detours into Spanglish, keeps his fictions fresh, as does his honest reckoning with life in the grittier suburbs of the Southwest. Though he is still working out some kinks, GilbDauthor of the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning story collection The Magic of Blood, a novel and a number of widely anthologized essaysDis a writer to watch.
