Brownsville: Stories
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.33 (744 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0316146803 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 176 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
carsylAwesome book This book was so awesome and even better cause its about from where i am from also it was super cheap but the book was practically new. ak said Awesome book. This book was so awesome and even better cause its about from where i am from also it was super cheap but the book was practically new. "Fantastic Book!" according to P. Gonzalez. I'm from the Rio Grande Valley, and I totally related to all of these wonderful and colorful stories. I'm so glad that the Valley is producing writers of quality like Oscar Casares. I have always been proud of the fact that I am Mexican-American and from The Valley, but I feel even prouder of that fact, when I read a book like this. Felicidades Oscar!. Wonderful Debut Collection! Latino life in the small Texas border city of Brownsville comes alive in this entirely engaging debut collection of nine short stories arranged in three parts. The first three stories are grouped in the section "I Thought You and Me Were Friends", and focus on male relationships. The opening tale tells of a young boy working at a firework stand and his realization that his boss isn't a nice person. The second is about a man overly obsessed with a hammer borrowed by a white neighbor, and charts the ups and downs of their friendship in relation to the hammer. The final story follows
At the country's edge, on the Mexican border, Brownsville, Texas, is a town like many others. It is a place where people work hard to create better lives for their children, where people bear grudges against their neighbors, where love blossoms only to fade, and where the only real certainty is that life holds surprises.
. He was raised in Brownsville and is a lifelong resident of Texas. Oscar Casares received an MFA at Iowa and his stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Northwest Review, and Threepenny Review
Probing underneath the surface of Tex-Mex culture, Casares's stories, with their wisecracking, temperamental, obsessive middle-aged men and their dramas straight from neighborhood gossip are in the direct line of descent from Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. From Publishers Weekly "I thought writing everything down on paper was a good way to defend myself," says the unnamed narrator of "RG," one of the nine stories in Casares's fine debut collection set in the Texas border town of Brownsville. . In the funniest story in the collection, "Chango," an unemployed 31-year-old, Bony, living with his parents and subsisting on a steady diet of beers, finds a monkey head in his yard and begins to think of it as his buddy and mascot. Bony's father, a police sergeant, is prone to sarcastic explosions: "¨Estas loco o qu‚? You want to live with monkeys, I'll drive you to the zoo. "RG" is related by a Hispanic bread-truck driver whose Anglo neighbor borrowed his best hammer and didn't return