Stephen Gutierrez
Stephen D. Gutierrez joined FC2 with the publication of Elements, which won the 1996 Nilon Excellence in Minority Fiction Award. His next book, Live from Fresno y Los, won an American Book Award in 2010, and is published by Bear Star Press. The Mexican Man in His Backyard, Stories & Essays, came out in 2014 and completes his trilogy, My Three-Volume BOXED set. He hopes to see it boxed before or soon after he is boxed. He has published essays and stories in many magazines and anthologies, and has produced plays in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Buffalo, New York. Originally from Los Angeles, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches at California State University East Bay.
Elements
Playing the game and hating the game, assimilating and giving the finger to assimilation, these ‘elements’ are really powerful designs within an intricate tapestry of an east L.A. presence that is Latino, talented, angry, and often brutally hilarious.
Elements
Stephen Gutierrez
1997
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-025-9
Elements is a wild ride through the barrios of East L.A.: two homeboys caught in a burglary, a Hollywood weirdo, a loner brooding on a drug deal, and a would-be writer cartwheeling across the landscape, falling down flat and getting up again in a series of stories displaying the confusion and angst, and the joys and beauties, of being Mexican-American and being alive.
Like rap and hip-hop, Elements is composed of concentric levels that build, self-comment, deconstruct and construct until we have a complex portrayal of a Latino buoyed up by the polyphony of voices within. Playing the game and hating the game, assimilating and giving the finger to assimilation, these ‘elements’ are really powerful designs within an intricate tapestry of an east L.A. presence that is Latino, talented, angry, and often brutally hilarious.