GORDO by Jaime Cortez

“Stories that serve as unvarnished, even fond, testaments to a tough, queer life.”

gordo

than the first: teenagers at an English boarding school battle fairies, women are wooed unexpectedly by dragons, and the Chinese lunar goddess, Chang E, is reenvisioned as an extraterrestrial college student. The stories are told with the precise and almost sparse voice of fairy tales, but they can sometimes veer toward the excessively fanciful. Some, like “One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland” and “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again,” rely too much on humor and speculative elements without quite landing. Nevertheless, the collection’s most moving stories harness seamless worldbuilding, intriguing character development, and thematic complexity.

A swath of delightful and intricate stories from a wildly inventive storyteller.

GORDO

Cortez, Jaime Black Cat/Grove (208 pp.) $16.00 paper | Aug. 17, 2021 978-0-8021-5808-6

The pudgy, queer kid at the heart of these stories must navigate the harsh but loving community of migrant farm workers in rural California in the mid-1970s. “I get picked on all the time for being fat, cuz I can’t throw a ball, for speaking English all wrong,” Gordo confesses in “Fandango,” in which he confronts the rare phenomenon of an apparent gringo coming to work at the garlic fields. It’s an indication of how baffling Gordo finds the adult world that he doesn’t understand that someone with red hair can be a Mexican named Juan Diego. The redhead encourages young Gordo to down some tequila at a boisterous Saturday night fandango that Gordo would prefer to observe, sitting on an upturned bucket just outside the circle of men who are drinking and listening to a Vicente Fernández record. “It tasted awful, but now everybody likes me,” Gordo says. “For once, all the guys like me!” That party ends in two brothers having a violent brawl, one of them rushed to the emergency room by some of the other men even though they’re furious at the brothers for fighting so intensely. In “Raymundo the Fag,” Raymundo is by now the most talented hairstylist in Watsonville, such a star that Olga, his colleague, urges him to move to San Francisco or even just Salinas, which is at least a bigger town than Watsonville. “Half the culeros in this town have harassed or beat me, when they weren’t trying to get into my pants,” Ray tells her. “But I’m still here and taking their money to make their wives and girlfriends look foxy. That’s home, Olga. I’m not going nowhere.” Raygay, as he was known by his bullies when young, is asked to make one of his middle school tormentors look good in death; one side of Shy Boy’s head is punctured by a bullet and only Ray can make the wig look stunning. These stories are elemental and unfussy, their emotional hearts affecting and memorable.

Stories that serve as unvarnished, even fond, testaments to a tough, queer life.

MOON AND THE MARS

Corthron, Kia Seven Stories (704 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 31, 2021 978-1-64421-103-8

Historical fiction set in New York City’s Irish and Black communities before and during the Civil War. Theodora “Theo” Brigid Brook, born in 1850 to an Irish mother and Black father, grows up in Five Points. An orphan from an early age, Theo is raised in two cultures—one Irish, at Grammy Cahill’s, the other Black, at Grammy Brook’s. Both multigenerational families feature intriguing, well-imagined characters, especially Auntie Siobhan, who runs a tavern she inherited from her late husband, and Auntie Eunice, who starts a ladies salon in Greenwich Village; and both are further enriched through fostered characters, the Cahills with cousin Ciaran, an Irish immigrant who struggles to stay out of trouble, and the

Brooks with Auntie Maryam, a former slave who escapes north via the Underground Railroad. Theo is present for many major events, like Illinois Rep. Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Institute speech, and discusses everything she misses with her hypererudite relatives, who are as informed about politics and current events as any internet-era journalist could dream of being. The novel relies heavily on contemporaneous newspaper articles, scores of which are partially reprinted, quoted from memory, read aloud, or teased by newsboys shouting from street corners. And while these and other recitations of historical fact, about Tammany Hall, the Dred Scott case, the Hall Carbine Affair, and so much more, are unquestionably informative, characters who speak like Wikipedia entries don’t necessarily make for engaging fiction. Theo has the outlines of a truly memorable character, but it feels as if Corthron chose the comprehensiveness of a textbook—there is a 20-page bibliography—over a narrative that would catalyze an absorbing novel.

An ambitious, educational novel that tries to do too much.

SIEGE OF COMEDIANS

Daitch, Susan Dzanc (336 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sep. 28, 2021 978-1-950539-33-8

A century-spanning murder mystery that focuses more on the identities of the victims than the killers. Iridia is a forensic sculptor in Brooklyn working for the Missing Persons bureau. Her job is to reconstruct the faces of unidentified skeletal remains in order to help identify them. The functionally orphaned child of two imprisoned, weed-growing anarchists, Iridia is used to a life of isolation, but when a seemingly innocuous cold case lands in her lap, she’s drawn into a conspiracy involving arson, murder, exotic animal smuggling, and, eventually, threats on her life. In a bid to disappear as permanently as the still anonymous owners of the skulls in her studio, Iridia winds up in Vienna, where she attempts to