About this item
Josh Barkan's astonishing collection indelibly captures the beauty, strangeness and brutality of life in modern Mexico. The characters in these pages are everyday citizens - a chef, architect, nurse, high school teacher, painter, beauty queen, classical bass player, plastic surgeon, businessman, mime - simply trying to lead their lives and steer clear of violence. Yet inevitably, violence has a way of intruding on their lives. A surgeon finds himself forced into performing a risky procedure on a narco killer. A teacher struggles to protect lovestruck students whose forbidden romance has put them in mortal danger. A painter's freewheeling ways land him in the back of a kidnapper's car. Again and again, the lines between "ordinary life" and cartel violence are shown to be paper thin, with tragic results.
About the Author
JOSH BARKAN won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and has been a finalist for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He spent much of his childhood abroad, living in Kenya, Tanzania, France and India. After attending Yale University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, he spent a year teaching in Japan and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His writing has appeared in Esquire and as a contributor to The Boston Book Review. With his wife, a painter from Mexico, he divides his time between Mexico City and Roanoke, Virginia, where he teaches at the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins. He has taught writing at Harvard, Boston University, and New York University. His previous books include the novel Blind Speed and the story collection Before Hiroshima.
