Offering a sampling of stories, poems, essays, images, and historical documents from the Lonestar State, Texas Literature hopefully will enrich your own perspective of the state Molly Ivins affectionately called "cantankerous and ridiculously friendly.

Texas Literature: A Case Study

Literature & Fiction

Gilb, Dagoberto

Texas Advisory Board

Literary

Bedford/St.Martin's

The first novel by a PEN Award-winning writer tells of a Southwestern man who moves into a YMCA to await a check, becomes the center of attention for the indigent, lonely residents, and is involved in a shocking event.

The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna

United States

Atlantic Monthly Pr

A collection of stories by the award-winning Latino author of The Magic of Blood and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acu±a chronicles the lives of men and women living in Houston.

Woodcuts of Women

Grove Pr

A collection of essays by the critically acclaimed author of Woodcuts of Women explores what it means to be a Mexican-American artist in the literary world at large in his own native Texas borderland, in such works as "Mi Mommy" and "Me Macho, You Jane," as well as other works written for Harper's, NPR's "Fresh Air," and The New Yorker.

Gritos: Essays

Sonny Bravo is a tender, unusually smart fifteen-year-old who is living with his vivacious mother in a large city where intense prejudice is not just white against black, but also brown. When Sonny’s mother, Silvia, suddenly marries an Okie building contractor named Cloyd Longpre, they are uprooted to a small apartment building, Los Flores. As Sonny sweeps its sidewalks, he meets his neighbors and becomes ensnared in their lives: Cindy, an eighteen-year-old druggie who is married and bored; Nica, a cloistered Mexican girl who cares for her infant brother but who is never allowed to leave their unit. The other tenants range from Pink, an albino black man who sells old cars in front of the building, to Bud, a muscled-up construction worker who hates blacks and Mexicans, even while he’s married to a Mexican-American woman. Dagoberto Gilb, in arguably his most powerful work yet, has written an inspiring novel about hate, pain, anger, and love that transcends age, race, and time. Gilb’s novel displays the fearlessness and wit that have helped make him one of this country’s most authentic and original voices.

The Flowers: A Novel

GROVE PRESS

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 worka 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.

Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories

The Magic of Blood

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.

Mickey Acuña is a man suspended between a vague past and a vaguer future. Emerging from the landscape of the Southwest, buffeted by life and licking his wounds, he moves into a YMCA to wait for a check that is coming to save him and that demands an address. As days and then weeks pass without its arrival, he picks up work - first odd jobs and then shifts at the cash register of the Y - and hangs out with his neighbors, playing handball, drinking coffee, shooting pool, getting drunk, falling in love or lust with women he meets, works with, passes on the street. In the vacuum of the Y, Mickey finds himself becoming the unwitting center of a community starved for human contact and for meaning: Sarge, with his fast-food coupons; Omar, with his drunken rages and obsession with the vanished Lucy; Rosemary, whose abundant physical presence both attracts and repels him. Mickey fights to maintain his distance and his freedom, until the narrative converges abruptly around him in a profound and shocking conclusion.

The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña: A Novel

Dagoberto Gilb is an acknowledged master of the short story, the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a PEN/Faulkner finalist for his debut collection, The Magic of Blood, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his fiction writing. His critically acclaimed collection Woodcuts of Women is now available in paperback and features ten moving and heartbreaking stories of lust, love, and longing among men and women struggling to find their way in the world. Written in Gilb's spare, humid language, each of these haunting stories is crafted with a poetic, aching beauty. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers. "The sheer intensity and bravado of [Gilb's] vision make this collection succeed." -- Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review "Lonely, tough stories -- stories that force us to confront what's difficult in us, and in the people we love." -- Adrienne Miller, Esquire "Gilb's stories read like verbal woodcuts deliberately unrefined and carefully unadorned, clear in their intent but without undue elaboration...." -- Sean Glennon, The Hartford Courant "...Gilb writes of the gritty passions of man for women, grand delusions and tender mercies...." -- Oscar C. Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

Woodcuts of Women: Stories

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.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilb, Dagoberto. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gilb, Dagoberto

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilb, Dagoberto. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Texas Literature: A Case Study

The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna

Woodcuts of Women

Gritos: Essays

The Flowers: A Novel

Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories

The Magic of Blood

The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña: A Novel

Woodcuts of Women: Stories

Gritos: Essays