Amazon
Centaur of the North
Category:
Literary Fiction
ISBN-10: 1558851658
Type: Fiction
ISBN-13: 9781558851658
This is a collection of nine stories and winner of the Premio Aztlan.
“A powerful first collection.”
-The New York Times Book Review
“The language of these stories is superb: incantatory and dense with textures, images, and smells... we are there in the perfumed heady stew of other people's families and we can use what we learn of their puzzling myths and unknowable histories to look at our own."
-Harvard Book Review
“Highly recommended.”
-Choice
Excerpt
"Times, I believe I have only room for Soledad, and I have carried it with me all these years.... Perhaps it is better than carrying ashes or memories, better than lugging around the certainties of lineage that splay through other lives like the hungry hard branches of a spreading tree. Perhaps it is far better to carry just one word when one drives great distances in the desert, easier to sound just one word in blues and reds and blacks that far from the crowded world, from the cities of competing sounds. Perhaps it is more practical to hear oneself utter a single word, easier for the vast desert skies to hear it, the rocks to send it back, the solitary mind to contemplate the intonation and stress of each isolated vowel and consonant. Soledad... perhaps such a single word is more suited to a living soul - or a dead one - and as easily suited to the single spark from my campfire that spirals up and dies in the night sky near Piedras Negras, where I often dream of my ancestors, see them in the tongue of flame, in the faces among the black rocks, and call their names in the impossible song of my impossible race."
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