Lionel Garcia believes that no one should read a short 
story and be the same person afterward. The fifteen stories 
in this collection have that effect. They will touch each 
reader differently but leave none untouched.
     

These stories focus on South Texas' Hispanic culture 
most frequently - but not always. It is a world Garcia 
knows well, and he portrays its complexities with a 
clearly realistic and often bemused eye.
     

In some stories he sees his subjects with a gentle 
vision that stops just short of sentimentality - in 
"Alone," Constancia, lonely after years of divorce, nearly 
throws herself at the plumber, with surprising results. In 
"Always Verbena," Beatrice and Antonio are reunited after 
tragedy and years of cowardice have separated them. Sometimes 
Garcia veers off into the hilariously funny, such as "West 
Texas Cowboys," where inept cowboys use dynamite to blast 
postholes in a mountain - and blow the top off the mountain. 
Or the title story where an insane uncle, about to be taken 
to an institution by the sheriff, is protected by his guardian 
and aunt. The final scene becomes a wild tangle of people 
tripping over one another, all searching for the missing 
uncle. Sometimes Garcia's vision of his world is grimly 
realistic - in "Girl" a bipolar woman indulges in a monologue 
as she recounts her bizarre marital history and sex life. 
But Garcia's imagination can also lead him to the surreal - 
in "The Wedding," a stranger stumbles into a home where a 
woman keeps her husband prisoner in his bedroom. The story 
ends with a surprise twist. Some stories demonstrate the 
confusion between Hispanic and Anglo cultures - in 
"Mammogram," River Oaks meets illegal alien in a sketch 
that will make you smile. In "The Sergeant" the confusion 
takes on more serious overtones because the Latin protagonist 
believes everything American is perfect. The truth is a bitter lesson.


Garcia writes in his introduction that short stories should 
begin and end, "in a flash." These stories do.
     


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LIONEL G. GARCIA'S short stories and novels have won the PEN 
Discovery Prize, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones 
Award for Fiction, the Fiction Prize of the Year, and many 
other awards. He lives in Seabrook, Texas.