Long Stories Cut Short

Fictions from the Borderlands

Frederick Luis Aldama author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Arizona Press

Published:7th Feb '17

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Long Stories Cut Short cover

Xbox videogamer cholo cyberpunks. Infants who read before they talk. Vatos locos, romancing abuelos, border crossers and border smugglers, transvestites, drug kingpins, Latina motorbike riders, philosophically musing tweens, and so much more.
 
The stories in this dynamic bilingual prose-art collection touch on the universals of romance, family, migration and expulsion, and everyday life in all its zany configurations. Each glimpse into lives at every stage—from newborns and children to teens, young adults, and the elderly—further submerges readers in psychological ups and downs. In a world filled with racism, police brutality, poverty, and tensions between haves and have-nots, these flashes of fictional insight bring gleaming clarity to life lived where all sorts of borders meet and shift.

Frederick Luis Aldama and graphic artists from Mapache Studios and illustrator Jaime Hernandez give shape to ugly truths in the most honest way, creating new perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about life in the borderlands of the Américas. Each bilingual prose-art fictional snapshot offers an unsentimentally complex glimpse into what it means to exist at the margins of society today. These unflinching and often brutal fictions crisscross spiritual, emotional, and physical borders as they give voice to all those whom society chooses not to see.

“Buzzin’ from start to finish, an unexpected bilingual knock-out punch!”—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States

“Call these stories what you will: flashes, shards, fragments, splinters. For me, this is narrative shaved to the quick—necessary and nuanced, at once urgent and pithy, as insightful as they are carefully made. Take your time with these fictions, folks. With Frederick Aldama, our borderlands, real and imagined, are in the most artful of hands.”—Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories
 
“Aldama stuns, surprises, and delights. This is no small feat. He is a linguistic trapeze high-wire artist and delivers verbal theatrics, the likes of which will stay in your mind and heart for a very long time.”—Denise Chávez, author of The King and Queen of Comezón

ISBN: 9780816533978

Dimensions: 187mm x 127mm x 17mm

Weight: 223g

208 pages