Josh Barkan

Harvard Book Store welcomes prize-winning short story author JOSH BARKAN for a discussion of his book, Mexico: Stories.

About Mexico

The unforgettable characters in Josh Barkan’s astonishing and beautiful story collection—chef, architect, nurse, high school teacher, painter, beauty queen, classical bass player, plastic surgeon, businessman, mime—are simply trying to lead their lives and steer clear of violence. Yet, inevitably, crime has a way of intruding on their lives all the same. A surgeon finds himself forced into performing a risky procedure on a narco killer. A teacher struggles to protect lovestruck students whose forbidden romance has put them in mortal peril. A painter’s freewheeling ways land him in the back of a kidnapper’s car. Again and again, the walls between “ordinary life” and cartel violence are shown to be paper thin, and when they collapse the consequences are life-changing.
 
These are stories about transformation and danger, passion and heartbreak, terror and triumph. They are funny, deeply moving, and stunningly well-crafted, and they tap into the most universal and enduring human experiences: love even in the face of danger and loss, the struggle to grow and keep faith amidst hardship and conflict, and the pursuit of authenticity and courage over apathy and oppression. With unflinching honesty and exquisite tenderness, Josh Barkan masterfully introduces us to characters that are full of life, marking the arrival of a new and essential voice in American fiction.

Praise

"Barkan . . . brings a journalist's eye to his stories and lends each of his primary characters a believable sympathy and often a life-changing moment. Despite the inherent compassion in many of these stories, there's also an underpinning of violence from Mexico's ongoing drug war that gives them a very unsettled air . . . Masterful stories that peel away at the thin border between everyday life and profane violence in modern-day Mexico." —Kirkus, starred review
 
"Barkan turns in a near-perfect debut collection that's addictive, delicious, and confounding in its knife-edge ride through the hard lives of its characters." —Library Journal, starred review

"Mexico is a marvel. Josh Barkan has created a suite of stories that are beautiful and harrowing, wise and comic. His heroes, mostly American ex-pats who have headed South to reinvigorate their lives, are continually cast into danger, and forced to reckon with the darkness that lives around them, and within them. And yet, the wonder of these stories is their ability to guide us through this rough terrain without descending into cynicism. As readers, and humans, we are inspired by these tales to “sing in some way of beauty, to raise the spirit of our voices in hope." —Steve Almond, author of The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories and Candyfreak