Overview

Stories of working-class Mexican America, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicanx literature. ""Gilb's familiar signature intimacy brings us face to face with marginal housing, gritty and exhausting jobs, street people, sex, earthquakes, fouled air, physical handicaps, racism. . . . Some of the stories are sidewinders: at first they indicate layers of something juicy and sweet but turn out to pierce the reader with painful splinters of insight.""-Annie Proulx, author of ""Brokeback Mountain"" and The Shipping News Dagoberto Gilb's latest 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 leads him into a dangerous dalliance; a former high-rise carpenter who meets up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more. Gilb's distinct narrative voice offers his readers a warm welcome as he peels back the surface of everyday life to seamlessly guide us into realms of of myth and fable.

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9780872869318

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Reviews

"""Gilb's familiar signature intimacy brings us face to face with marginal housing, gritty and exhausting jobs, street people, sex, earthquakes, fouled air, physical handicaps, racism. . . . Some of the stories are sidewinders: at first they indicate layers of something juicy and sweet but turn out to pierce the reader with painful splinters of insight. . . . an enjoyable work of high craftsmanship by a notable American writer.""—Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News ""So alive, so wise, so gritty, sensual, so felt, so many flashes of startling poetry. I kept thinking, I've never encountered a voice quite like this one, it has this reverb that hooks you, that vibrates under the printed words and inside your own blood, what is that? But now I understand: it's pure mastery, truth, beauty, life, it's that power inside this intimate space of a story but that goes on and on and never stops. Dagoberto Gilb is an American great."" — Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy: A Novel"

Praise for Before the End, After the Beginning: “[A] collection distinguished by a steadfast lightness of touch . . . [Gilb] brings lived-through-it detail to all of these stories.”—Susannah Meadows, The New York Times “[Readers] luxuriate in . . . prose that is as sudden as it is meditative. . . . [Before the End, After the Beginning] places Gilb’s talent for rendering the mundane into myth on full display.”—Robert Ontiveros, San Francisco Chronicle “Accessible and resonant . . . [these] are such true, human stories.”—San Antonio Express “Stark, realistic, and told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose . . . Gilb portrays his characters simply and powerfully, without apology; even his unnamed characters represent the plight of not only every working-class Mexicano but Everyman.”—Boston Globe “The situations [in these stories] are part of the everyday, normal struggle to keep one’s head above water and one’s heart sane. Dagoberto Gilb writes about these matters in a mature and subtle manner.”—NPR’s All Things Considered “Don’t dare put Gilb’s writing in any category. He’s as fine at the lyrical as he is at the vernacular. And his subject is as universal as it can get: the mystery of existence . . .”—Dallas Morning News

"Praise for Before the End, After the Beginning: ""[A] collection distinguished by a steadfast lightness of touch . . . [Gilb] brings lived-through-it detail to all of these stories.""--Susannah Meadows, The New York Times ""[Readers] luxuriate in . . . prose that is as sudden as it is meditative. . . . [Before the End, After the Beginning] places Gilb's talent for rendering the mundane into myth on full display.""--Robert Ontiveros, San Francisco Chronicle ""Accessible and resonant . . . [these] are such true, human stories.""--San Antonio Express ""Stark, realistic, and told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose . . . Gilb portrays his characters simply and powerfully, without apology; even his unnamed characters represent the plight of not only every working-class Mexicano but Everyman.""--Boston Globe ""The situations [in these stories] are part of the everyday, normal struggle to keep one's head above water and one's heart sane. Dagoberto Gilb writes about these matters in a mature and subtle manner.""--NPR's All Things Considered ""Don't dare put Gilb's writing in any category. He's as fine at the lyrical as he is at the vernacular. And his subject is as universal as it can get: the mystery of existence . . .""--Dallas Morning News"

Author Information

Dagoberto Gilb is the author of eleven books, including The Magic of Blood, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acua, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, The Flowers, and Before the End, After the Beginning, with City Lights Publishers. Among his honors are the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. His work has been a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle and PEN/Faulkner Awards and has been honored several times in Texas as a proud part of its literary tradition. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Best American Essays, O'Henry Prize Stories, and much of it widely reprinted in textbooks. He is the founder of Huizache, a groundbreaking literary magazine that features Latino writing. Born and raised in Los Angeles by his Mexican mother, he now lives in both Austin and Mexico City.

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