From “an important voice in American fiction” (Annie
Proulx), a collection of essays that cuts to the heart of
the Mexican-American experiencennDagoberto Gilb is one
of today’s most captivating and provocative fiction writers.
Now Gilb offers a collection of essays that brilliantly
portrays an artist working to earn respect—and find his
place—as a Mexican-American in the literary world and the
world at large, to say nothing of his singular and beloved
borderland of Texas.nn“Gritos” are the cries in Mexican
songs— exuberant and excited, loud and long—and Gilb’s
essays are charged with the same urgency, sincerity, and
musicality. Whether describing the humbling experience of
turning to a psychic and being mysteriously ignored, or the
nervous rush of attending a White House dinner as an
award-winning author, Gilb’s stories attune us to the
complexities of emotion and the exhilarating subtleties of
everyday life.nnIn “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes,” his
controversial piece for Harper’s, he travels to the land of
his mother, to the spot where Cortés first saw Malinche. In
his heartrending piece “Mi Mommy,” published in The New
Yorker, he tackles the myths surrounding Mexican women such
as his mother, and in “Me Macho, You Jane,” those
surrounding men like himself. In “Vaya con Dios, Rosendo
Juarez,” he is asked to write a cop show for TV, and must
struggle with its racist implications.nnWhether his subject
is cockfighting, Cormac McCarthy, fatherhood, or the
constant frustrations of writing from the margins, Gilb can
tell it only as he sees it, with his trademark combination
of candor, lyricism, and wit. Always, he engages the reader
with scenes as vividly rendered as they are funny, intimate,
sometimes devastating. Even for those who have not had the
pleasure of reading Gilb’s fiction, Gritos is an engaging
glimpse into the heart and mind of a passionate and
idiosyncratic thinker.
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