Borderlands: Short Fictions

James Carlos Blake

Jan 2012 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Winner of the Border Regional Library Association Southwest Book Award: A gritty, action-packed collection of short stories from a master of the American West.  Dolores and her mother have not seen Dolores’s daddy for five days. Dolores—whom daddy calls Sugargirl—leaps to greet him when she hears his heavy steps on the front porch. Daddy is drunk, battered, and smells of cheap perfume; his return is cut short when Momma chases him out of the house with a hot iron. A few years later, when Momma is dead and Daddy is serving a thirty-to-life stint in the state penitentiary, Dolores gets a letter addressed to Sugargirl. She is sixteen, on her own, and life will not get easier from here. This novella and the seven accompanying stories represent the finest short fiction of acclaimed author James Carlos Blake. While the tales span centuries and continents, the characters share a common trait: They are citizens of the borderlands, from whence death is the only escape. Blake expertly captures the complexities of the border area in these raw and honest adventure stories of love and vengeance.

About the author

James Carlos Blake (b. 1947) is one of America’s most highly regarded living authors of western fiction. He was born in Mexico, and his family moved regularly when he was a child, living in various towns along the border and coast before finally settling in Texas when Blake was six. After a stint in the army, Blake attended the University of South Florida and received a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University. He would later teach at both of these universities, but in 1997 he left teaching to write fulltime. Blake’s first novel, The Pistoleer, was published in 1995 to overwhelming acclaim. Its unusual format—with each chapter told from a different character’s perspective—caused critics to dub it an unusually promising debut. Since then Blake has written eight novels and one collection of stories, most of which are inspired by real-life characters from the American West. He lives and works in Arizona.