Dagoberto Gilb is the author of the story collection Before the End, After the Beginning (2012), the novel The Flowers (2008), Gritos (2003), an essay collection which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Woodcuts of Women (2001), The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), and The Magic of Blood (1993), which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a PEN Faulkner finalist. He also edited Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature, which won the 2007 PEN Southwest Book Award for nonfiction. He has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as regional honors such as the Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Anthologized widely, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a wide array of magazines, including Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Ploughshares, Slate, Aztlan, Callaloo, among many. A construction worker for sixteen years, a high-rise union carpenter for twelve of them, he has since taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Wyoming, the University of Arizona, Vassar, California State Fresno, and Texas State University. At the University of Houston-Victoria, Gilb is the executive director of CentroVictoria, a center for Mexican American literature and culture, where he is also its writer-in-residence at UHV.
-
The Magic of BloodStoriesFrom"Recipe"
You will begin to listen to the story of Josie’s life in Spanish and English. You will begin to like the way she looks. At moments you will confuse her with the stripper dancing naked on the table next to where the two of you talk. Josie will be telling you about her marriage, about her husband, about her divorce, about her daughter, about her sadness and disappointment. You will have more drinks than her.
“Recipe” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Recipe” originally appeared in Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press).
The Magic of Blood:Stories -
The Magic of BloodStoriesFrom"The Desperado"
His adrenalin shook the bed. The boy stirred. Tucker patted his son’s back, praying the boy wouldn’t wake up, not yet. He wanted to know where the fuck she was. He wished he hadn’t slapped her. He wished the boy hadn’t seen him slap her. He remembered how quiet the boy was when they were fighting. He remembered that he didn’t cry then. The boy was back asleep. Tucker decided he too could use some winks. He tried to sleep, and after a while he did.
“The Desperado” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “The Desperado” originally appeared in The Sonora Review.
The Magic of Blood:Stories -
The Magic of BloodStoriesFrom"Ballad"
He tried to ignore that snake, and he’d moved a chair around the room so he wouldn’t notice it. He moved the television. None of it did any good. He ate TV dinners with it above him. His whole childhood it was coiled above him. Once he stared into its jaws and let himself enter. It was dark and frightening, but then that went away, just as time did. Just as time did watching a movie on the television. Good guys, bad guys, guns, horses, right, wrong. The West.
“Ballad” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Ballad” originally appeared in The Threepenny Review.
The Magic of Blood:Stories
“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 . . . Triumphantly, Gilb built this book. It’s masterful, bottom to top.” —Dallas Morning News [on Before the End, After the Beginning]
“The prospect of reading a novel narrated in run-on sentences, fragments, Spanish phrases and street slang might seem daunting, but not when you meet the precocious, Holden Caufieldesque narrator of Dagoberto Gilb’s coming-of-age novel . . . Sonny’s voice is mesmeric. It keeps us reading.” —Sarah Fay, The New York Times [on The Flowers]
“Dagoberto Gilb’s stories in The Magic of Blood, pulled from a working-class life, are like nothing else out there. The reader tumbles into a Southwest world of bills and debts and being laid off, of old trucks, paychecks that bounce, greedy landladies, fights, cheap girls, drugs, unemployment compensation, difficult bosses, color of skin, language games, a hunger for work. The stories are leavened with compassion and humor and there is not a shred of sentimentality. The Magic of Blood marks the introduction of an important new voice in American literature.” —E. Annie Proulx, from the citation for PEN’s Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Bookshop
