The winner of PEN's Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award presents a lovely, heartbreaking, finely crafted collection of stories about the poor and working-class in America's Southwest. "As unexpectedly beguiling and unforgettable as the arid stretches between their settings in El Paso and Los Angeles".--Library Journal.

Before the End, After the Beginning is a personal and honest collection of ten exquisite stories from Dagoberto Gilb. The pieces come in the wake of a stroke Gilb suffered at his home in Austin, Texas, in 2009, and a majority of the stories were written over many months of recovery. The result is a powerful and triumphant collection that tackles common themes of mortality and identity and describes the American experience in a raw, authentic vernacular unique to Gilb.
These ten stories take readers throughout the American West and Southwest, from Los Angeles and Albuquerque to El Paso and Austin. Gilb covers territory familiar to some of his earlier work--a mother and son's relationship in Southern California in the story 'Uncle Rock' or a character looking to shed his mixed up past in 'The Last Time I Saw Junior'--while dealing with themes of mortality and limitation that have arisen during his own illness. Confronting issues of masculinity, sexuality, and mortality, Gilb has recovered and produced what may be his most extraordinary achievement to date.

Dagoberto Gilb is an acknowledged master of the short story, the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a PEN/Faulkner finalist for his debut collection, The Magic of Blood, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his fiction writing. His critically acclaimed collection Woodcuts of Women is now available in paperback and features ten moving and heartbreaking stories of lust, love, and longing among men and women struggling to find their way in the world. Written in Gilb's spare, humid language, each of these haunting stories is crafted with a poetic, aching beauty. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers. "The sheer intensity and bravado of [Gilb's] vision make this collection succeed." -- Jean Thompson, The New York Times Book Review "Lonely, tough stories -- stories that force us to confront what's difficult in us, and in the people we love." -- Adrienne Miller, Esquire "Gilb's stories read like verbal woodcuts deliberately unrefined and carefully unadorned, clear in their intent but without undue elaboration...." -- Sean Glennon, The Hartford Courant ."..Gilb writes of the gritty passions of man for women, grand delusions and tender mercies...." -- Oscar C. Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

From Dodger Stadium to the Astrodome, from the Rio Grande Valley to Chicago, from Veracruz to Puerto Rico, from high-school teams to stickball in the streets, from the lessons of fathers to the excited joy of daughters, from massive cheering in the stands at Wrigley Field to the dynamics of family and community echoing on the diamond, these fifteen stories use the sport of baseball to explore geographical, cultural and dream-like spaces that transcend traditional notions of the game and transform it into a universal yet wholly individual experience. Featuring the work of Dagoberto Gilb, Norma Elia Cantu, Nelson Denis, Christine Granados, Rene Saldana, Jr., and many more.