Praise for The Flowers

“The prospect of reading a novel narrated in run-on sentences, fragments, Spanish phrases and street slang might seem daunting, but not when you meet the precocious, Holden Caufieldesque narrator of Dagoberto Gilb’s coming-of-age novel . . . Sonny’s voice is mesmeric. It keeps us reading.” —Sarah Fay, New York Times

“The Flowers is just a period in a kid’s life. The events portrayed in the novel—the violence, the racism, the sordid beauty and the sadness—these things are just the norm for Sonny. And that’s what makes the book so powerful . . . after I read The Flowers it would be a lie if I were to say Gilb is a good writer. He’s not. He’s way, way better than good. The Flowers is the best book yet by one of our finest authors.” —Eric Miles Williamson, San Francisco Chronicle

“The Flowers is laced with humor and tenderness and, in the end, a sense of hope . . . The author handles the voice of a teenage narrator with skill . . . [and] does an admirable job with the rhythm and flow of the novel . . . The simple language of the novel often turns lyrical. The result is a portrait of a working-class world with all its flowers and thorns.” —David Medina, Houston Chronicle

“Not since James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice has the unspoken so crackled with sexual tension . . . Gilb’s dialogue, working class and downbeat, is inspired. When Sonny and his contemporaries converse in combo—Spanish and English as one—poetry emerges.” —Los Angeles Times

“Gilb expresses sympathy for women under the thumb of angry, threatened men while vividly portraying a romantic, vulnerable, yet calculating and resilient young man coming of age in a storm of prejudice. With a scorching sense of humor, a keen ear for dialogue, and a gift for creating microcosms, Gilb tells a suspenseful tale of loneliness, rage, yearning, and hope.” —Booklist

“The raw narrative about the life of the teenaged Sonny is especially intriguing because of its gritty authenticity. Gilb conveys a realness lacking in more conventional novels by using a mix of Spanish and English to show how Sonny speaks and thinks and by allowing the plot to skip along in relation to Sonny’s tangled thoughts.” —Library Journal

“Gilb’s new novel is hilarious and thought provoking as it traces the bigotry and alienation among the wildly varied cast of characters living in and around the Los Flores apartment building . . . Gilb offers sharp commentary via his quick-witted narrator, and the reader feels Sonny’s disaffection as his world dissolves into chaos.” —Publishers Weekly

“Along with Sonny’s daydreams come lessons about life . . . [and] through it all, there is a taste of something sweet: the faint hope of love in the offing, even as sirens scream out above an angry city.” —Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio

“What makes The Flowers bloom, what lifts it beyond polemic and cliché, is its ability to transport the reader into another life. A story ‘that didn’t have nothing to do with people or places you’ve ever seen,’ the book also lifts its seasoned author to another place in the literary order.” —Steven Kellman, Texas Observer

“Reading this captivating, deceptively compact novel is like having a nimble, well-informed guide on a journey into Sonny Bravo’s contradictory, multidimensional, multicultural self.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

“With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilb’s story alights on all kinds of touchy subjects—racism, illegal immigration, women’s roles, sex, and drugs—he never lectures. Instead, he creates a tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about.” —New West Book Review

“The Flowers might be Dagoberto Gilb’s second novel, but it’s no sophomore effort . . . Reading The Flowers, one is reminded of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose protagonist, like Sonny, finds strength in solitude . . . Gilb has created a character so vivid and sympathetic that we can’t withhold our suspension of disbelief for very long.” —Austin-American Statesman

“Like all coming-of-age novels narrated in the first person, the success of The Flowers depends on its protagonist’s voice and sensibility. Sonny Bravo’s voice captured me from the beginning and, despite some shaky stretches, didn’t let go until the end.” —John Repp, Cleveland Plain-Dealer

“The Flowers illuminates the true art of Dagoberto Gilb’s fiction as he explores life’s passions and ambiguities while grappling with the interplay between hope and despair. This is a ferocious, provocative novel, one that confirms Gilb’s reputation as one of our finest contemporary writers.” —El Paso Times

“Dagoberto Gilb’s new novel, The Flowers, is a tightly woven narrative about a boy coming of age in a community bubbling with racial tension. It’s beautifully rendered in part because Mr. Gilb nails the voice of 15-year-old narrator Sonny Bravo with pinpoint accuracy.” —Dallas Morning News

“The Flowers is a bildungsroman about how Sonny, a flawed, deeply appealing hero, becomes a man . . . Gilb writes in a dry yet luminous style; the patience and calmness of his writing quiets and ensnares the reader. And although he peppers his tale with Spanish, his writing is accessible even to people who, like me, don’t speak Spanish.” —St. Petersburg Times

“The Flowers reveals a writer at the height of his powers, at ease with characters both unique and archetypal, a plot that caroms like a heat-seeking missile, and thematic concerns from the many faces of love, racial prejudice and violence, and hope in spite of shattered dreams.” —Albuquerque Alibi

“From the first measured words of Dagoberto Gilb’s new novel to its final, heart-wrenching exclamation, Gilb takes readers through a journey that is both startling and inevitable. Its painstaking start may create impatience in some readers, but once The Flowers gets going, it sails to its wondrous conclusion . . . [Gilb] writes with enormous acuity, heart, and, most importantly, a deep respect for even the most unsavory of his characters and their deeds.” —Austin Chronicle

“Dagoberto Gilb is one of the most powerful writers of his generation, and The Flowers is perhaps his best book. It contains a wonderful, almost magical, evocation of Los Angeles. It’s not to be missed.” —Larry McMurtry

Praise for Dagoberto Gilb:

“Dagoberto Gilb has written a brilliant novel that vibrates with the psychic underpinnings of the contemporary Latino experience in Los Angeles. He captures the fluid literacy of fifteen-year-old Sonny Bravo, whose untutored intelligence sparkles with the raw poetic power of the streets. As a Chicano novelist, Dagoberto ventures into the nether world of an apartment house—where the social intercourse between the working class, immigrant, criminal, black, white and brown tenants of Los Flores is unrelentingly secretive and full of longing—and creates a new kind of literature out of the barrio English of his protagonist. His achievement is a stunning portrait of a crackling bilingual universe where life and ‘death hums through the wires’ above the streets. It is a totally original work of American literature.” —Luis Valdez

“Dagoberto Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women is not just a man’s book of stories about women—it’s a wonderful exhibit of talent: great stories about men and women and the old fandango, tango, cha-cha-cha of their dance together. These stories are hard-hitting and heart-filling. The vision, like the writing, is clear and sharp—a mix of Raymond Carver and Anton Chekhov. But no one writes like Gilb. You finish reading his book and you begin right then to wait for the next one. He’s that good.” —Julia Alvarez, on Woodcuts of Women

“Gilb is a legitimate and undeniable talent. Not just in ‘Chicano literature,’ not just in a certain part of the country or in select college syllabi, but in the vast black sea of American ink.” —Austin Chronicle

“Gritos is an intimate look at Gilb’s growth as a writer grappling with a desire to stay true to his working class roots, and at the same time expose the powerful talent he has for penetrating, honest, and emotional writing about cultural misconceptions, family relationships, manual labor, and American literature.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Dagoberto Gilb is an important voice in American fiction. These stories of working-class, low-rent lives illuminated by the small pleasures of sex and drink and food and sleep and relief from the heat, stories of people with explosive tempers stumbling back and forth over cultural borders, of pregnancies and evictions and sudden love . . . are like no others. We need these stories.” —Annie Proulx, on Woodcuts of Women

“The Flowers speaks to us of heartbreak in a fractured urban world and of the courage it takes to survive there. We’re lucky to have this fellow shining his light for us.” —William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field

“Woodcuts of Women portrays men in the brightness of rage, lousy jobs, divine lust, and, especially, in the dazed sucker punch of love. Love, after all, is what this book is all about, love from the heart, and from that other needy vortex below the waist as well. Love ‘that makes you sick like a flu.’ Here is the Southwest without myth and sentimentality. And here are los hombres with all their bravado and hungry hurt.” —Sandra Cisneros