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Klappentext "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 work--a 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. "[Readers] luxuriate in prose that is as sudden as it is meditative. . . . [Before the End, After the Beginning] places Gilb's talent for rendering the mundane into myth on full display."--San Francisco Chronicle "Gilb's voice has an authenticity that's unimpeachable."--San Antonio Express News ""Stark, realistic, and told in mostly gritty matter-of-fact prose . . . Gilb portrays his characters simply and powerfully, without apology; even his unnamed characters represent the plight of not only every working-class Mexicano but Everyman." --Boston Globe "Dagoberto Gilb's mission in Before The End, After the Beginning is not to dazzle and amaze, but to implode myths and misconceptions, to expose us to forgotten and subterranean characters in constant transition and exile; characters inured to injury and pain, heartbreak and woe--yet who never jettison hope for a better life, nor a future uncertain, yet still very much possible. These Chicano dreamers are lovelorn and love-tossed, broken-yet-healing, but most of all, on the road to recovery from an America that shuts its eyes and ears at their very existence. Gilb shows us that every man, woman and child is a citizen of hope, succors the birthright of love and freedom in their hearts, and sin fronteras, can, and will, emerge victorious. Make no mistake about it, by the end of Before The End, After the Beginning, you will be dazzled. And amazed."--ZZ Packer "The situations [in these stories] are part of the everyday, normal struggle to keep one's head above water and one's heart sane. Dagoberto Gilb writes about these matters in a mature and subtle manner." --All Things Considered, NPR "Don't don't dare put Gilb's writing in any category. He's as fine at the lyrical as he is at the vernacular. And his subject is as universal as it can get: the mystery of existence . . . Triumphantly, Gilb built this book. It's masterful, bottom to top." --Dallas Morning News "Of their surfaces, t ...
