"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. . . . an enjoyable work of high craftsmanship by a notable American writer."–Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain"
"So alive, so wise, so gritty, sensual, so felt, so many flashes of startling poetry. I kept thinking, I've never encountered a voice quite like this one, it has this reverb that hooks you, that vibrates under the printed words and inside your own blood, what is that? But now I understand: it's pure mastery, truth, beauty, life, it's that power inside this intimate space of a story but that goes on and on and never stops. Dagoberto Gilb is an American great." – Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy: A Novel
"From the first line, Dagoberto Gilb's new story collection captivates readers as if drawn by a perfectly taut silver thread. From one story to the next, each so efficient not a sentence is wasted, readers are swept through youth's most tantalizing, shining shards of memory until, inescapably, the sandstorms of time render Gilb's characters and their recollections with increasing texture and complexity. By the end, Gilb has fully immersed us in the rich amber depths where pure voice and thought become material, and time, for those precious instants, holds its breath. Dagoberto Gilb again proves to be a masterful mason of literary craft and a foundational storyteller in Chicano and American literature."–Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You
