Uncivil Rights, and Other Stories

Short Fiction. Nash Candelaria, a native of New Mexico, is the author of an acclaimed series of historical novels about the Southwest. His 1982 novel, NOT BY THE SWORD, received an American Book Award in 1983. This latest book of seven short stories, also set primarily in the Southwest, explores border culture, social issues, relationships, and the experience of living in an unwilling hybrid culture such as that in the U.S., in prose which is as delightful as it is precise. "Alfonso Pea was a wrinkle of a man," begins the title story. "Not just the creases around his eyes, the corners of his mouth, or his neck. Not just his clothes. But everything about him. His life was an unneat series of furrows and rumples that were chaotic and irretrievably fixed. No iron was hot enough, no steam press powerful enough to smooth them out." Without "smoothing out" the fictional realities of the lives he creates, Candelaria takes his readers with him on a journey into the "series of furrows and rumples" that make up our "unneat" existence.