Winner of the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction!
Sometimes the border is a mirror, sometimes an escape, and sometimes it’s just the bridge you cross to go home.
Product Details
10-digit ISBN
1-935955-32-2
13-digit ISBN
978-1-935955-32-0
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Page Count
180
Product Dimensions
6 x 9
Rights
All Rights Available
Benjamin Alire Sáenz's stories reveal how all borders entangle those who live on either side. Take, for instance, the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande. It’s a touchstone for each of Sáenz’s stories. His characters walk by, they might go in for a drink or to score, or they might just stay there for a while and let their story be told. Sáenz knows that the Kentucky Club, like special watering holes in all cities, is the contrary to borders. It welcomes Spanish and English, Mexicans and gringos, poor and rich, gay and straight, drug addicts and drunks, laughter and sadness, and even despair. It’s a place of rich history and good drinks and cold beer and a long polished mahogany bar. Some days it smells like piss. “I’m going home to the other side.” That’s a strange statement, but you hear it all the time at the Kentucky Club.
Click here to listen to Ben on Words on a Wire where he talks short stories, addiction, and of course, the Kentucky Club, plus hear an excerpt from "The Hurting Game."
Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a highly regarded Latino writer of fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. Like these stories, his writing crosses borders and lands in our collective psyche. Poets & Writers Magazine named him one of the 50 most inspiring writers in the world. He’s been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN Center’s prestigious award for young adult fiction. Sáenz is the chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Publishers Weekly
Sáenz's moving collection of short stories hinges on the intergenerational clientele of the titular borderland watering hole just south of the U.S.-Mexican divide on Avenida Juárez…there's much to enjoy in these gritty, heartfelt stories.
Seven excellent stories … [by] a versatile writer … Sàenz writes prose that is tender, occasionally fierce, and always engaging. Read every word of his stories lest you miss some clever twist, some subtle irony, some gentle nuance of poetic imagery that he has labored to create.
Though the prolific Benjamin Alire Sáenz has been writing books in every genre for the past two decades, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club is only his second short-story collection. But the wait was definitely worth it … [The story "He Has Gone to Be with the Women"] is nothing short of a masterpiece … In one story, a school counselor says the following about his troubled charges: "They came to me with a thirst in their eyes, a thirst, such a thirst and I knew that I could never give them the rain they deserved, the rain they so desperately needed." That might as well be The Kentucky Club speaking, since every protagonist in this heartbreaking collection of stories finds his way to a confession stool at the bar. They find no solutions to their ills, just a sensitive ear that has heard it all before but is willing to listen once again.
The legendary [Kentucky Club], says author Benjamin Alire Sáenz, is where people go when they're in trouble, when they're looking for trouble or when they're trying to get out of trouble. That's the underlying theme of the stories in the new collection Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club. The first, “He Has Gone to Be With the Women,” underscores why Poets & Writers Magazine named Sáenz one of its 50 most inspiring writers.
