Mexico: Stories

Josh Barkan

Jan 2017 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Robert Fass

About this audiobook

The characters in these stories are everyday citizens-a chef, architect, nurse, high school teacher, painter, beauty queen, classical bass player, plastic surgeon, businessman, mime-simply trying to lead their lives and steer clear of violence. Yet inevitably, violence has a way of intruding on their lives. A surgeon finds himself forced into performing a risky procedure on a narco killer. A teacher struggles to protect love-struck students whose forbidden romance has put them in mortal danger. A painter's freewheeling ways land him in the back of a kidnapper's car. Again and again, the lines between "ordinary life" and cartel violence are shown to be paper thin, with tragic results. Though the lives of Mexico's characters are effected by the corrupt and dangerous subculture of their country, these are much more than simple "crime stories". They are complicated and deeply moving tales that tap into universal and enduringly powerful themes: love and loss, religion, family relationships, government abuse, sexual identity, professional ambition, cancer; they introduce us to characters that feel fully realized in their humanity.

About the author

Josh Barkan's fiction has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and the Lightship International Short Story Prize. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, he received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

A two-time Audie Award winner, veteran actor Robert Fass is equally at home in a wide variety of styles, genres, characters, and dialects. He has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, including for his narration of Francisco Goldman's novel Say Her Name.