Since the publication of his 1985 chapbook of stories, Winners on the Pass Line, Dagoberto Gilb has been altering the literary landscape by offering his readers strong working class-centered fiction about Latinos in the Southwest. His efforts have earned him awards and honors such as the PEN/Hemingway Award for his breakthrough collection The Magic of Blood. Now, the 11 pieces in his latest collection, New Testaments—released October 1 by City Lights—further cement his reputation as a master of the short story by quietly incorporating a theme that has hitherto been largely latent in his work: surrender as a form of salvation.
In this spry and soulful selection of recent stories culled from publications such as Alta Journal, A Public Space, and Zyzzyva, Gilb, now 74, returns to familiar themes of families dealing with economic disparity and men caught in what could only be called a kind of dangerous love. But in a book where toxicity can take the form of a criminally bent cousin or a literal toxic cloud, characters often abandon anger for a retreat into tranquility.
An ex-musician rationalizes how the stolen photograph of an ex-lover might be a rite of passage for an adolescent thief, a former high-rise construction worker visiting a past paramour at a Starbucks refrains from physically countering a lunatic barking incoherent racist epitaphs at him, and a young man trying to connect with a father he scarcely knows at a Mexican restaurant that sells Peking duck disappears into Mexico when the meeting is cut short by a conflagration connected to the Symbionese Liberation Army and the LAPD.
