New Testaments: Stories

The ordinary lives of Mexican America, an almost invisible working class and culture, portrayed with unflinching candor, steeped in wry, compassionate soufulness, in tales where realism is the portal to myth and legend.

This collection of eleven stories is the newest installment of an ongoing literary documentary project, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicano literature. Writing in the tradition of those great storytellers whose works have consistently derived from a region and its people (William Faulkner, Flannery O-Connor, Juan Rulfo), Dagoberto Gilb has devoted the past 40 years to an evolving, multi-volumed group portrait of "the most ordinary lives of some of the most ordinary Americans," the Mexican American working class from the American West -- from Los Angeles to El Paso and places in between.

Here we encounter a cast of characters that includes a young family whose exposure to a mysterious cloud of gas alters their lives forever; a teenage high school dropout whose choice to learn the ways of the world from adults in a workplace setting leads him into a dangerous dalliance; a retired construction worker who finally relents and agrees to meet up with an eager old flame, and becomes the target of a random attack; an aging widower living alone in his home whose children suspect that he's not capable of properly taking care of himself and are trying to intervene; and more.

These are stories free of the stereotypes, cliches and tropes plaguing most depictions of this community, people who otherwise go mostly unnoticed and ignored. There are no heroes or saints, just regular people with their flaws and merits, facing the challenges and questions posed by everyday life. Dagoberto Gilb's meticulously crafted prose creates and sustains a unified voice throughout, distinctive and appealing. The effect is sparse, but profound, deftly capturing the nuances of interpersonal relationships in a simple word or gesture, where undertones of surrealism, myth and legend bubble up to the surface among the textures and tensions of the physical and emotional landscapes of everyday life.