Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015: When the patriarch of a wealthy Mexican family is kidnapped his immediate family is forced to flee the country – leaving their money, friends and home behind. In each of these nine linked stories, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho follows a different member of the Arteaga family as they deal with the legacy of their last name and the tragedy that befell it. In ‘Okie’, a grandson struggles to make sense of his new home in Palo Alto; in ‘Origami Prunes’ Arteaga’s daughter begins an affair in an Austin Laundromat; and in the title story, a new dad wanders the Madrid streets adrift and aloof, seeing visions of his father. Barefoot Dogs depicts a searing portrait of innocence and experience: the unshakeable belief that everything will work out against the salty hard certainty that loss, betrayal and evil are lurking around the corner. These stories are fresh, funny and full of life. What makes them so memorable is the universal connection we all have to home, that at some point in our lives, all we want is to be back there. For many of us that is a given, and for others, it is an impossibility – a crushing reality that Ruiz-Camacho executes flawlessly. – Al Woodworth
Review
"Barefoot Dogs is a splendid collection. Each of these stories is a straight-on jab to the soul, the kind of sharp fictional punch that wakes us up to our own flawed, fragile, essential humanity. With this debut collection, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho shows he's already a writer of the first rank, one of those rare storytellers who leaves you wanting more even as he breaks your heart." (Ben Fountain author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
“Antonio Ruiz-Camacho's Barefoot Dogs is bravura, brilliant, moving, hilarious—it's both clear-eyed and dreamy, strange and beautiful, stories for our time, and also for all-time.That it's his first book is a wonder, and a wonderful promise.” (Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant's House and Thunderstruck)
"Antonio Ruiz-Camacho has written a marvelous and moving story collection: Barefoot Dogs is a brilliant and devastating portrait of a scattered, entitled, and traumatized Mexican upper-class, waking up in horror to the reality of the country they once owned. A tour de force." (Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles)
“In the world of today no calamity stays local, no tragedy private. Someone missing at a street corner leaves unhealed scars in other countries, among different generations. It is with this keen sense of intersection between personal and impersonal history that Antonio Ruiz-Camacho approaches his characters—his scrutiny of them, his empathy for them, and his versatile voice reminding us of Grace Paley, among other masters of the short story.” (Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude)
“'Are you afraid of a human’s touch? Have you become that American already?' one of Antonio Ruiz-Camacho’s displaced upper-class Mexican characters asks another who is about to become her lover in the Austin, Texas laundromat where they meet. The brilliantly gifted Ruiz-Camacho, writing in English about the members of a Mexican family forced to flee their country, brings the terror, sadness, tenderness and intimacy as well as the class absurdities of contemporary Mexican life into that most traditional of American forms, the realist short story. Ruiz-Camacho’s mastery will impress and astonish, open your eyes, but most of all, each one of these stories will unforgettably touch your heart and move you." (Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name and The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle)
“Mexican-born,Texas-based journalist Ruiz-Camacho shows a wealth of talent in this fiction debut….Outstanding…Funny….A nimble debut that demonstrates not a singular narrative voice but a realistic chorus of them.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Antonio Ruiz Camacho springs out of the gate with an assured, beautiful collection of stories. There were several spots that made me stop and go back to them. And not a few others that made me burn with envy. Great stuff.” (Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter)
"Barefoot Dogs offers readers a relatable experience of dealing with unexpected tragedy, even when framed by a less-than-relatable situation. An extremely promising debut."
(Booklist)
An unforgettable debut of linked stories that follow the members and retinue of a wealthy Mexican family forced into exile after the patriarch is kidnapped.
On an unremarkable night, José Victoriano Arteaga—the head of a thriving Mexico City family—vanishes on his way home from work. The Arteagas find few answers; the full truth of what happened to Arteaga is lost to the shadows of Mexico’s vast and desperate underworld, a place of rampant violence and kidnappings, and government corruption. But soon packages arrive to the family house, offering horrifying clues.
Fear, guilt, and the prospect of financial ruination fracture the once-proud family and scatter them across the globe, yet delicate threads still hold them together: in a swimming pool in Palo Alto, Arteaga’s young grandson struggles to make sense of the grief that has hobbled his family; in Mexico City, Arteaga’s mistress alternates between rage and heartbreak as she waits, in growing panic, for her lover’s return; in Austin, the Arteagas’ housekeeper tries to piece together a second life in an alienating and demeaning new land; in Madrid, Arteaga’s son takes his ailing dog through the hot and unforgiving streets, in search of his father’s ghost.
Multiple award-winning author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho offers an exquisite and intimate evocation of the loneliness, love, hope, and fear that can bind a family even as unspeakable violence tears it apart. “A straight-on jab to the soul” (Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), Barefoot Dogs is a heartfelt elegy to the stolen innocence of every family struck by tragedy. This is urgent and vital fiction.
For the last eighteen years, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho has worked as a journalist in Mexico, Europe, and the US. A 2009 Journalism Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2014 Dobie Paisano Fellow in Fiction, Ruiz-Camacho earned his MFA from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. His work has appeared in The New York Times, StoryQuarterly, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. He is from Toluca, Mexico, and lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.
您现在的位置：
