Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands (Camino del Sol) - Tapa blanda

"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 Chavez, author of The King and Queen of Comezon

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 Americas. 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.