This haunting collection marks the debut of a gifted storyteller, a lyric and transcendent voice. The stories reverberate with a soul-aching need to fit the puzzle pieces together. Wendell Mayo reveals the power of family storytelling, both real and imagined.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Centaur of the North takes on the themes of family, myth, and memory as Wendell Mayo explores how narrative can tie people to a place and to one another and how disrupting such discourse can throw folks into confusion about who they are and where they come from. Mostly set on the Gulf Coast in Corpus Christi, Texas, the stories in this collection delve into family legends and questions of veracity. Mayo's writing is assured and evocative, painting a picture of hot places where the vapors of memory and language answer burning questions of "Who am I?" only with bits of family lore and uncertain memory.
From Booklist
These stories are concerned with the slow, uneven puzzling together of a Spanish or Mexican familial heritage (mythic and otherwise). Most of the stories are set in or partly look back on a family's beginnings in Corpus Christi and nearby towns, and they effectively evoke local natural and human landscapes. The central characters are driven by the need to understand mothers (and sometimes fathers or grandfathers) who seem oddly distant or inaccessible through everyday modes of understanding but who are slightly readable in the bits of stories they tell of their own or their family's past or in the unexplained rituals they perform. The sons and daughters come to see these tales and rituals as fragments of a past, and partly because of the unhappiness or distance or incongruities that past seems to create for their parents--sometimes tragically, as in "Soledad" --these children are redefined by their pursuit of a new relation to it. There are several haunting and illuminating explorations here. Jim O'Laughlin
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ghosts, poetry, conquistadors,
By Michelle (san francisco) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Centaur of the North: Stories (Paperback)
This is a beautiful book. Don't miss the story "Conquistador," a graceful and heartbreaking tale. These are stories to be read aloud. If you believe that the best fiction reads like poetry, Mayo's your man.
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