Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Dagoberto 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.
"Gritos" are the exuberant cries in Mexican songs, and Gilb’s essays are charged with the same urgency, sincerity, and musicality. In a controversial piece for Harper’s, he travels to the land of his mother, where Cortes first met Malinche. In "Mi Mommy," published in The New Yorker, he tackles the myths surrounding Mexican woman, and in "Me Macho, You Jane," those surrounding men like himself. In his pieces written for NPR’s "Fresh Air," he engages the reader with scenes as vividly rendered as they are funny, intimate, and sometimes devastating. Like his fiction, Gritos is a riveting glimpse into the heart and mind of a passionate and idiosyncratic thinker.
