Friday, November 28, 2008

DANIEL CHACON. UNENDING ROOMS

I've been reading and reading and rereading and rereading the stories from DANIEL CHACON's newest collection, UNENDING ROOMS, available from BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS. Chacon keeps tugging me in different directions, everytime I think I know where I'm being taken I'm wrong. This book is a place where Mexican gangstas, gorgeous red heads that disappear and may or may not have actually existed, retards, gay policemen, gringo tourists, holes in the sides of mountains, beggars, and street vendors, all peacefully coexist; symphonies get orchestrated, people get decapitated by moving objects, insinuations get made, conspiracies theorized. Read this shit now. Here's what other people have said:

Unending Rooms is a visit to the hidden recesses of the mind, a place where Jorge Luis Borges and Stephen King sit down for coffee while a cello plays a bittersweet melody you can almost remember. Once you enter, you will emerge a different person.”
Kathleen Alcalá

Daniel Chacón’s distinctive storytelling, with its defiance to linearity and closure, with its leanings toward metafiction, gestures south to the Latin American greats like Borges, Cortázar and Paz, but his sensibility is puro Chicano—the hero and anti-hero of the twenty-first century who sinks and swims through libraries and barrios, politics and passions, tradition and innovation. “Unending Rooms” is a testament of identity as experienced, not on the margins, but at the center of the beautiful and terrifying cycles.”
Rigoberto González

Additional info is HERE

1 comment:

Ara 13 said...

Thanks for the recommendation. Ara 13 author of Drawers & Booths.