Unending Rooms

Daniel Chacón

Release Date: November 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0981589930

Price: $18.00

eBook Price: $7.99



DESCRIPTION

Daniel Chacón is a thoroughly modern writer, his exploration of inter-personal relationships cutting to the core of who we are. The winner of The Hudson Prize, Chacón's collection of stories, set mainly in the southwest, digs deep into the lives of each character, laying bare their emotional distance, vulnerabilities and desires. Chacón’s writing is deceptively simple, Carveresque at times in its plain talk. And yet, the narrative in each of these stories is dead-on-the-money, intimate and insightful. All the universal themes are there, love and acceptance, rejection and loss, fitting in and standing out, while in the hands of a masterful story teller like Daniel Chacón, each tale is brilliantly crafted and unique.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Unending Rooms is pure loco wisdom koan, like a slow cruise down a jagged street in a sweet ride on a boulevard of present moments without end.” —Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Skin Tax  

"Unending Rooms is a visit to the hidden recesses of the mind, a place where Jorge Luis Borges and Stephen King sit down for coffee while a cello plays a bittersweet melody you can almost remember. Once you enter, you will emerge a different person." —Kathleen Alcala, author of The Desert Remembers My Name and Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist

“Daniel Chacón’s distinctive storytelling, with its defiance to linearity and closure, with its leanings toward metafiction, gestures south to the Latin American greats like Borges, Cortázar and Paz, but his sensibility is pure Chicano — the hero and anti-hero of the twenty-first century who sinks and swims through libraries and barrios, politics and passions, tradition and innovation. Unending Rooms is a testament of identity as experienced, not on the margins, but at the center of the beautiful and terrifying cycles.” —Rigoberto González, author of Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad)

“Although the impact of these stories is utterly adult, they are told with deceptive and seductive simplicity, and reading them is like being invited back into childhood, where fantastical premises, straight-forward syntax, and endless possibility were the literary pleasures. Chacon has either reinvented the form, or refreshingly reminded his readers of what stories do best: linger in the mind like a sudden firework, a flash of pretty magic, in an otherwise dark sky.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Female Troubles and In the Land of Men

 

REVIEWS

"Unending Rooms is a creation that is itself an exploration of the creative process...Chacon's world ... a world where things aren’t necessarily what they seem, or what you expect. A world where what you wanted to happen dissolves into the reality of what is unfolding around you." —The Undercurrent