Borderlands: Short Fictions

By James Carlos Blake

The scrublands of South Texas, the warm coastland of the Gulf of Mexico, a cinderblock flophouse near the produce fields of South Florida: all are borderlands of mixed blood and spilled blood, of generations forged in fight, failure, and hope. In this extraordinary collection of short works, the masterful James Carlos Blake, author of In the Rogue Blood and the Wolfe family series of border noirs, journeys from the nineteenth-century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of today.

Borderlands begins with an introductory piece of memoir, called The Outsiders,” about Blake’s own straddling of worlds and identities. In the following eight haunting stories, we meet Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza, a powerful landowner reduced to howling at the moon from behind the bars of a mental institution; an illegal immigrant in Florida who must reckon with his emotional turmoil after being robbed by a fellow Mexican; a Texas woman orphaned by disease and desertion, making her way into a violent world of men; and many more who pass through the shadows of the borderlands. Bold, honest, and humane, these pieces represent some of the best writing from one of the most original and authentic voices in contemporary fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780802189431

James Carlos Blake

James Carlos Blake is the author of nine novels. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Southwest Book Award, Quarterly West Novella Prize, and Chautauqua South Book Award. He lives in Arizona.

Reviews for Borderlands

[lhicks5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book would be excellent to use with older high school students in an ethnic studies or Chicano(a) studies class. Since the book is a collection of short stories, the book can be divided amongst the class, in order to accomodate for students who either have trouble reading longer books or do not have a strong passion for reading. In addition, the book might spark the interest of students who can relate on a cultural and socio-economic level. I like how some of the stories used the first person, and the detail of the surroundings made it easy to visual the environment in some of the stories.