Bøger af Dagoberto Gilb

The lives of working class Mexican America, where everyday stories offer a portal to myth and fable.This collection of eleven stories is the newest installment of an ongoing, multi-volume literary documentary project, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicanx literature.Dagoberto Gilb's 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 in his uncle’s industrial laundry leads him into a dangerous dalliance;  a former high-rise union carpenter who agrees to meet up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more.These are stories about working class people who come and go mostly unnoticed or ignored, whose lives are not fodder for literary tropes or cliches. They are neither heroes nor villains, just regular people with their flaws and merits, facing the challenges and questions posed by everyday life. Gilb writes in a distinctive, appealing voice, welcoming the reader in with an easy sense of familiarity, and the effect is spare on the surface, but profound. Deftly capturing the nuances of interpersonal relationships in a simple word or gesture, he peels back the surface of seemingly unremarkable encounters to reveal layers of myth and uncanny surrealism, propelled by the momentum of new, changing times.

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.

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.

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