'Dagoberto Gilb's stories in The Magic of Blood, pulled from a working-class life, are like nothing else out there. The reader tumbles into a Southwest world of bills and debts and being laid off, of old trucks, paychecks that bounce, greedy landladies, fights, cheap girls, drugs, unemployment compensation, difficult bosses, color of skin, languages games, a hunger for work. The stories are leavened with compassion and humor and there is not a shred of sentimentality. The Magic of Blood marks the introduction of an important new voice in American literature.' E. Annie Proulx Dagoberto Gilb is one of the most powerful and original talents to emerge on the American literary scene in the last decade. Funny, fresh and exquisitely crafted, his stories, like Raymond Carver's, capture perfectly the struggles and quiet triumphs of everyday life. The Magic of Blood, Gilb's first book, won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award.

Dagoberto Gilb has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award for his fiction. A union construction worker for sixteen years, he is currently on the creative writing faculty of Southwest Texas State University. he is also the author of Woodcuts of Women and The Last Known Residence of Micky Acuna (selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year).