Description: With his first collection of stories, The Magic of Blood, which won the Pen/Hemingway Award and was a Pen/Faulkner finalist, Dagoberto Gilb received great acclaim as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction. Now Gilb returns to the short-story form with Woodcuts of Women, featuring 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. In "Maria de Covina", a young salesclerk fights to keep the love of his teenage girlfriend while at the same time succumbing to the allures of the perfumed older women he works with at the department store. In "Mayela One Day in 1989", an exotic and vivacious woman leads a bewitched man on a wild night in El Paso and into a gay bar, where she tests the limits of her seductive powers. In "Bottoms", a writer struggles to turn in a review of an erotic novel on deadline while fending off the advances of a married Amazon-like woman he has met at his community pool.

At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America's foremost Latino writers.

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