Mexico: Stories

by Josh Barkan Narrated by Robert Fass

Overview

The characters in these stories 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 love-struck 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. Though the lives of Mexico's characters are effected by the corrupt and dangerous subculture of their country, these are much more than simple "crime stories". They are complicated and deeply moving tales that tap into universal and enduringly powerful themes: love and loss, religion, family relationships, government abuse, sexual identity, professional ambition, cancer; they introduce us to characters that feel fully realized in their humanity.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Barkan…brings a journalist's eye to his stories and lends each of his primary characters a believable sympathy and often a life-changing moment. Despite the inherent compassion in many of these stories, there's also an underpinning of violence from Mexico's ongoing drug war that gives them a very unsettled air…Masterful stories that peel away at the thin border between everyday life and profane violence in modern-day Mexico.”—Kirkus (starred)
 
“Barkan turns in a near-perfect debut collection that's addictive, delicious, and confounding in its knife-edge ride through the hard lives of its characters.”—Library Journal (starred)
 

“What an unsettling, thrilling experience it is being dropped into the middle of Barkan’s Mexico. It is fraught, surreal, off-kilter, and very funny. Violence is as apt to erupt from any moment of fragile peace as great beauty and human spirit are apt almost miraculously to persist, to blossom out of all the mayhem and apparent hopelessness. These stories are wholly immersive, bizarre and recognizable at the same time, vital in their own unrepeatable, artful sensibility. “-Paul Harding, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Tinkers
 
“Mexico is a remarkable achievement. It is a portrait of a nation told from an astonishing range of characters, examining their daily lives in the wake of the violence created by the drug cartels.  With great authority and compassion, Josh Barkan explores the human cost of this violence, looking at this world with an eye that is both uncompromising and tender.  The stories are beautiful, funny, and terrifying; Barkan has created a collection that is utterly riveting and necessary. This is fiction of the highest order; read it now.” --Karen Bender, author of Refund (National Book Award Finalist, 2015)
 
“Mexico is a poignant and original collection of stories.  “In Mexico everything’s about excess” the narrator explains and Josh Barkan proves this truth at every turn.  He also reminds us that short stories, when beautifully written, are never short. “ - Jennifer Clement, author of Prayers for the Stolen (PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist, 2015)
 
“Macabre, outrageously funny, touching, and irresistibly readable, the stories in this collection depict with boldness the complexity, and madness, of contemporary Mexican society. The ensemble of diverse voices narrating these tales is mind-blowing. We have here the work of an original, terrifying and spectacularly gifted storyteller.” --Jaime Manrique author of Cervantes Street

“"Do you think you can stomach such a story?" one woman asks another in Mexico, Josh Barkan's impressive new collection. He possesses the skill, nerve, and compassion to tell unforgettable stories from across the border, stories that are by turns violent, tender, heart-breaking, haunted, and surprising, rendered with such exacting care that readers will answer that question with a resounding Yes.”-- Christopher Merrill, author of The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War (Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa)
 
“Mexico is a marvel. Josh Barkan has created a suite of stories that are beautiful and harrowing, wise and comic. His heroes, mostly American ex-pats who have headed South to reinvigorate their lives, are continually cast into danger, and forced to reckon with the darkness that lives around them, and within them. And yet, the wonder of these stories is their ability to guide us through this rough terrain without descending into cynicism. As readers, and humans, we are inspired by these tales to “sing in some way of beauty, to raise the spirit of our voices in hope.” --Steve Almond, author of The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories and Candyfreak
 
“Raw, strange, beautiful, the stories bring us into the heart of a very dangerous country, which is Mexico, and something else, which is ourselves.” --Peter Behrens, author of Carry Me (Winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Award, Canada)
 
“Barkan's collection will thrill anyone curious about what goes on behind closed doors in contemporary Mexico. These tales mic the seductive voices of the marginal and lost. With a ventriloquist's skill,​ Barkan gets his speakers to lure you up surprising steps:
​toward a​ sacrificial plateau where anyone might steal your heart, including ​
the notorious drug lord El Chapo as well as your neighborhood soldier and corner prostitute. Barkan's prose is empathic and lucid in stories too fantastic to be anything but real.”- Edie Meidav, author of Kingdom of the Young and Lola, California

Library Journal

★ 09/01/2016
A winner of the Lightship International Short Story Prize and other short fiction honors, Barkan turns in a near-perfect debut collection that's addictive, delicious, and confounding in its knife-edge ride through the hard lives of its characters. Set in a vividly depicted Mexico, where Barkan lives part-time with his Mexican painter wife, it opens with a chef who must think fast to create the perfect meal—and save the lives of his customers—when a notorious narco walks into his restaurant. The teacher who's told he'll be killed if he allows two students to continue their affair; the plastic surgeon who knows that by altering a notorious gangster's face, he's freeing the man to kill again; the elderly painter who needs a street tough to point out the damage he's done to his own family—all must recognize that they're in the power of others and ultimately face impossible choices. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 7/11/16.]

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-11-01
Twelve crime-tinted short stories from an American writer who lives part-time in Mexico.There's a Carver-esque quality to these painterly portraits of everyday people living in and around Mexico City. Barkan (Before Hiroshima: The Confession of Murayama Kazuo and Other Stories, 2011, etc.) brings a journalist's eye to his stories and lends each of his primary characters a believable sympathy and often a life-changing moment. Despite the inherent compassion in many of these stories, there's also an underpinning of violence from Mexico's ongoing drug war that gives them a very unsettled air. In the opener, "The Chef and El Chapo," a highly trained chef is faced with the unenviable task of making a delicious dish for the infamous head of the Sinaloa Cartel—using only two ingredients. Desperate to save a restaurant full of potential victims from harm, the chef dishes up slices of Wagyu beef seasoned with a child's blood. In "The God of Common Names," a Jewish schoolteacher tries to protect a star-crossed romance between two of his students and learns a hard lesson about faith and redemption. In "I Want to Live," an angry cancer patient confronts a famous and beautiful woman about her scars. Sometimes the violence in these stories is casual, as related by the narrator of "Acapulco," who blithely tells a tale of nightclubbing that ends in an execution. Yet in the very next story, "The Kidnapping," the violence is visceral and ugly and very real. "The cry from that woman, there was no faking there," says the narrator. "They take a pair of kitchen shears. They run it up along the skin. They scrape your knuckles with the edge of the blade of the scissors, until they bleed. I know how they do it, 'cause later they took one of my fingers off and sent it to my family. This is what they do." Masterful stories that peel away at the thin border between everyday life and profane violence in modern-day Mexico.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170127498
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/24/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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