Luis Alberto Urrea

Collects over thirty of the best entries in the Akashic noir series, including stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and T. Jefferson Parker.

This is a book of fragments, stories of moments in the lives of people along the Mexican border.

The author of "Across the Wire" offers brilliant investigative reporting of what went wrong when, in May 2001, a group of 26 men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona. Only 12 men came back out. "Superb . . . Nothing less than a saga on the scale of the Exodus and an ordeal as heartbreaking as the Passion . . . The book comes vividly alive with a richness of language and a mastery of narrative detail that only the most gifted of writers are able to achieve.--"Los Angeles Times Book Review."

"From the author of Pulitzer-nominated The Devil's Highway and national bestseller The Hummingbird's Daughter comes an exquisitely composed collection of poetry on life at the border. Weaving English and Spanish languages as fluidly as he blends cultures of the southwest, Luis Urrea offers a tour of Tijuana, spanning from Skid Row, to the suburbs of East Los Angeles, to the stunning yet deadly Mojave Desert, to Mexico and the border fence itself. Mixing lyricism and colloquial voices, mysticism and the daily grind, Urrea explores duality and the concept of blurring borders in a melting pot society"--

Fleeing a failed marriage and haunted by ghosts of his past, Luis Alberto Urrea jumped into his car several years ago and headed west. Driving cross-country with a cat named Rest Stop, Urrea wandered the West from one Spring through the next. As nature opened Urrea's eyes, writing opened his heart. In journal entries that sparkle with discovery, Urrea ruminates on music, poetry, and the landscape. With wonder and spontaneity, he relates tales of marmots, geese, bears, and fellow travelers. He makes readers feel mountain air "so crisp you feel you could crunch it in your mouth" and reminds us all to experience the magic and healing of small gestures, ordinary people, and common creatures.

Set in Arizona in the mid-1950s and alive with the unique racial mix of the American Southwest, In Search of Snow tells the story of Mike McGurk, a sort of blue-collar Don Quixote, whose search for love forms the backbone of this American picaresque novel. Son of the redoubtable Texaco Turk McGurk - gas station operator, small-time boxer, and wandering misfit who lets loose foul-mouthed slurs about almost everyone and hews to an impossible, often hilarious, code of masculinity - Mike yearns for his mother, who died when he was seven, and for a sense of family and connection, which the emotionally bankrupt Turk, for all his bluster and redneck charm, cannot provide. In his search for love and a life in the Arizona desert, where opportunities for both are limited, Mike makes a new friend in Bobo Garcia, a Mexican-American prize-fighter-turned-mechanic who is also a World War II veteran, albeit one who saw more of that war's horrors than Mike. Bobo rescues Mike from the clutches of Ramses Castro and his Indian gang and accompanies him on a journey that leads from one unlikely adventure to the next. From the excitement of erotic love, which beckons in the person of Mike's college-bound cousin Lily, to the comfort and responsibility of familial love amid the sprawling Garcia clan, Mike struggles with the sometimes comic dilemma of manhood. Although he begins as the victim of circumstance, Mike finally takes charge of his own destiny through a cathartic act of destruction that lights up his beloved Arizona desert. With a remarkable variety of idiosyncratic characters who are imagined in detail so telling that even their bedroom slippers speak volumes and with natural scenes so intimately rendered that you can hear the delicate sound of sand granules rustling along the tarmac in a light desert wind, In Search of Snow introduces an exciting new writer whose gift for fiction is as dazzling as his prose.

After breaking a curse that has troubled the kingdom for years, Shielder's Mark is rewarded with the hand of a princess only to find married life to be as difficult as any magical foe he's ever faced.

Luis Alberto Urrea's first book, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, was a haunting and unprecedented look at what life is like for those living on the Mexican side of the border, eking out only the barest of lives not far from the white sands and coral reefs of Southern California. His poignant, widely acclaimed account of the struggle of these people to survive amid the abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and legal and political chaos that reign in the Mexican borderlands vividly illustrated why so many are forced to make the treacherous and illegal journey "across the wire" into the United States. Written with the same unflagging curiosity, compassion, mordant wit, and novelistic sense of detail that made Across the Wire "a work of investigative reporting that is also a bittersweet song of human anguish" (Los Angeles Times), By the Lake of Sleeping Children explores the post-NAFTA and Proposition 187 border purgatory of garbage pickers and dump dwellers, gawking tourists and relief workers, fearsome coyotes and their desperate clientele. In sixteen indelible portraits, Urrea illuminates the horrors and the simple joys of people trapped between the two worlds of Mexico and the United States - and ignored by both. The result is a startling and memorable work of first-person reportage.

"In Urrea's exuberant new novel of Mexican-American life, 70-year-old patriarch Big Angel de la Cruz is dying, and he wants to have one last birthday blowout. Unfortunately, his 100-year-old mother, America, dies the week of his party, so funeral and birthday are celebrated one day apart. The entire contentious, riotous de la Cruz clan descends on San Diego for the events--"High rollers and college students, prison veternaos and welfare mothers, happy kids and sad old-timers and pinches gringos and all available relatives." Not to mention figurative ghosts of the departed and an unexpected guest with a gun. Taking place over the course of two days, with time out for an extended flashback to Big Angel's journey from La Paz to San Diego in the 1960s, the narrative follows Big Angel and his extended familia as they air old grievances, initiate new romances, and try to put their relationships in perspective. Of the large cast, standouts include Perla, Big Angel's wife, the object of his undimmed affection; Little Angel, his half-Anglo half-brother, who strains to remain aloof; and Lalo, his son, trailing a lifetime of bad decisions. Urrea (The Hummingbird's Daughter) has written a vital, vibrant book about the immigrant experience that is a messy celebration of life's common joys and sorrows" -- Publisher's weekly.

Offers a collection of six stories featuring Native American and Hispanic characters, set in various locations from Mexico City and Tijuana to the Sioux nation in South Dakota.