Dagoberto Gilb - BOOK LAUNCH - New Testaments: Stories

City Lights Books presents

reading from his new book

published by City Lights

Stories of working-class Mexican America, penned by one of the contemporary legends of Chicanx literature.

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest cast of characters includes a young family whose exposure to a mysterious cloud of gas alters their lives forever; a high school dropout whose choice to learn the ways of the world from the adults at work leads him into a dangerous dalliance; a former high-rise carpenter who meets up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more. Gilb’s distinct narrative voice offers his readers a warm welcome as he peels back the surface of everyday life to seamlessly guide us into realms of of myth and fable.

“Gilb’s familiar signature intimacy brings us face to face with marginal housing, gritty and exhausting jobs, street people, sex, earthquakes, fouled air, physical handicaps, racism. . . . Some of the stories are sidewinders: at first they indicate layers of something juicy and sweet but turn out to pierce the reader with painful splinters of insight.”–Annie Proulx, author of “Brokeback Mountain” and The Shipping News

Dagoberto Gilb is the author of eleven books, including The Magic of Blood, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, The Flowers, and Before the End, After the Beginning. In October 2024, two new books by Gilb will be published: A Passing West, an essay collection with the University of New Mexico Press, and New Testaments: Stories, with City Lights Publishers. Among his honors are the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. His work has been a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle and PEN/Faulkner Awards and has been honored several times in Texas as a proud part of its literary tradition. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Best American Essays, O’Henry Prize Stories, and much of it widely reprinted in textbooks. He is the founder of Huizache, a groundbreaking literary magazine that features Latino writing. Born and raised in Los Angeles by his Mexican mother, he now lives in both Austin and Mexico City.

Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation

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