"Dee Paxton, a widow at twenty-eight, finds herself pregnant and alone, back in her hometown and afraid to face the future. On impulse, she takes a job at a fabric store in the barrio, only minutes from the affluent neighborhood where she grew up but worlds apart. She doesn't tell anyone about her real life or her secrets."--Page 4 of cover.

Border Fictions offers the first comparative analysis of multiethnic and transnational cultural representations about the United States' borders with Mexico and Canada. Blending textual analysis with theories of globalization and empire, Claudia Sadowski-Smith forges a new model of inter-American studies. Border Fictions places into dialogue a variety of hemispheric perspectives from Chicana/o, Asian American, American Indian, Latin American, and Canadian studies. Each chapter examines fiction that ranges widely, from celebrated authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alberto Ríos to writers whose contributions to border literature have not yet been fully appreciated, including Karen Tei Yamashita, Thomas King, Janette Turner Hospital, and emerging Chicana/o writers of the U.S.-Mexico border. Proposing a diverse and geographically expansive view of border and inter-American studies, Border Fictions links the work of these and numerous other authors to civil rights movements, environmental justice activism, struggles for land and border-crossing rights, as well as to anti-imperialist forms of nationalism in the United States' neighboring countries. The book forces us to take into account the ways in which shifts in the nature of global relations affect literary production, especially in its hemispheric manifestations.

The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature traces a historical path through Latino/a literatures, with an enlightening analysis that also focuses on: recent themes such as gender and sexuality, feminist and queer voices, migration and border control different literary trends such as the postmodern, avant-garde, noir, and chica-lit language, code-switching and identity within the literature. With student-friendly features such as a glossary, guide to further reading, explanatory text boxes and chapter summaries, this is the ideal book for anyone approaching this broad and complex subject for the first time.

This powerful account chronicles the human drama of the devastating earthquake that rocked Mexico City.

A small town on the Mexican border draws a colorful array of characters in search of romance, sanctuary, fame, or fortune, including Mackie Larkin, a suburban mother desperate for money; her ex-husband Keith, a man with a host of get-rich schemes; their impulsive teenage daughter, Lianne; charismatic strip-club owner Buck Samsonov; and Nicholas Loeb, a struggling mystery writer. Reprint.

"Cartwright tells the story of the Chagra brothers, Lee and Joe, as they get mixed up with the drug-running community along the border and in short order find themselves hopelessly entangled in a net cast by the DEA. Even readers unfamiliar with the well-publicized events of the book or of the dark, lawless aspect that often rules El Paso will find themselves pulled along by the plot: brigands and intrigue leap from almost every page, and the story just gets wilder the further into it you venture."—from an Amazon.com review Four pages into this rollicking good story, the central figure, Lee Chagra, comes alive: "[Lee] washed his morning cocaine down with strong coffee and remembered the time he had met Sinatra, how genuine he appeared." Everything you'll need to know and remember about Chagra—the son of Syrian immigrants to Mexico and an attorney who spun the world of dope-running, border-crossing, high-living outlaws along the El Paso–Juarez border around his finger like the gaudy rings he favored—can be neatly summarized in that one sentence. Chagra dies two pages later, yet he haunts the rest of this cautionary tale like a high-rolling specter. Gary Cartwright is a long-respected, award-winning journalist and contributing editor to Texas Monthly magazine. The author of numerous books, he has contributed stories to such national publications as Harper's, Life, and Esquire. He lives in Austin, Texas.