Put aside what you thought you knew for sure about Southwest stories and get ready for an all-new and updated view of the way we live now. . . . The landscape is eternal--hot, breathless, by turns serene and menacing--but it is a living backdrop that speaks to a twenty-first-century Southwest literary tradition and provides us with a fresh way of understanding ourselves and our shared experience.--Southwest Books of the Year

A literary cornucopia of superbly crafted short stories, Road to Nowhere and Other Stories from the Southwest is a fascinating and entertaining anthology that will leave readers eagerly tracking down more from the represented writers.--Midwest Book Review

A literary cornucopia of superbly crafted short stories, Road to Nowhere and Other Stories from the Southwest is a fascinating and entertaining anthology that will leave readers eagerly tracking down more from the represented writers.--Midwest Book Review

In this book the Southwest emerges as a region dominated by short, intercut 'sights' rather than John Ford or Park Service panoramas. The views of the Southwest presented here are fleeting glances--a San Diego neighborhood glimpsed from a freeway on-ramp, a baby's cry heard in the desert night, freshly graded roads to subdivisions that don't yet exist. These stories force the Southwest to face itself in a future neither tourists nor locals could have foretold.
--Phillip Round, author of The Impossible Land: Story and Place in California's Imperial Valley

The wise, tough depictions of these unforgettable roads to ruin will cause you surprise--and gratitude. The characters here are true creatures of the desert making their way through the Middle of Nowhere to Nowhere, through the dry river beds, the dry lake beds and wastelands, and to the irredeemable places of ghosts and gun culture. Always desiring to leave, they resolve to stay, to be damaged and to cause damage. They find no shelter from the truth of their choices, past and present. Reading this fine anthology is like traveling under the searing, purifying Southwest sky. 'Why have I come?' you will ask, and 'Why would I ever leave?'--Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories