Unable to get around without a wheelchair, a young woman named Josee leads a solitary, housebound existence. Her key to the outside world is her friend Tsuneo, a recent college graduate and her so-called “caretaker.” The titular story, “Josee, the Tiger and the Fish,” depicts the precarious, at times sensual relationship that blossoms between these two young people still learning what it means to be happy. This anthology also includes eight short tales centering on working women and their myriad loves and partings sure to stir the heart and soul.

For every kid who's ever come in second place, this is a middle grade story about chasing your dreams. Eleven-year-old Annie Brown is used to being on the losing end of comparisons to her almost-always best friend Savannah. Savannah is MVP of the track team, has straight As, and, predictably, wins the most coveted school spirit award on the last day of 5th grade. Fortunately, Annie does have one very specialized skill. Inspired by As Seen on TV commercials, Annie likes to invent products and write clever sales pitches to go along with them. So when an opportunity arises to audition for a local web show called The Cat's Meow, Annie knows her future is set. She's going to wow those producers with her fabulous writing and made-for-TV announcer voice. Of course, things don't happen quite according to plan, and soon Annie is worried about losing both the opportunity she's been training for her whole life, and her best friend.

Since the 1980s, a prolific "second wave" of Chicano/a writers and artists has tremendously expanded the range of genres and subject matter in Chicano/a literature and art. Building on the pioneering work of their predecessors, whose artistic creations were often tied to political activism and the civil rights struggle, today's Chicano/a writers and artists feel free to focus as much on the aesthetic quality of their work as on its social content. They use novels, short stories, poetry, drama, documentary films, and comic books to shape the raw materials of life into art objects that cause us to participate empathetically in an increasingly complex Chicano/a identity and experience. This book presents far-ranging interviews with twenty-one "second wave" Chicano/a poets, fiction writers, dramatists, documentary filmmakers, and playwrights. Some are mainstream, widely recognized creators, while others work from the margins because of their sexual orientations or their controversial positions. Frederick Luis Aldama draws out the artists and authors on both the aesthetic and the sociopolitical concerns that animate their work. Their conversations delve into such areas as how the artists' or writers' life experiences have molded their work, why they choose to work in certain genres and how they have transformed them, what it means to be Chicano/a in today's pluralistic society, and how Chicano/a identity influences and is influenced by contact with ethnic and racial identities from around the world.

This poetic narrative discusses the creative life of a 9th century Indian stonecarver who is drafted at an early age to spend his entire life working on the thousands of statues that fill the niches of an Indonesian temple. Exploring the muse-artist relationship as few works of fiction have done, this novel is an intensely political work--a parable that pits the blind cruelty of a feudal ruler against the creative expression of a single slave.

Told in the voice of a lone holdout standing guard on an unnamed frontier, Redoubt addresses questions of conception and birth, gender, war and the slouch toward Apocalypse. Structured like a series of jazz riffs, its thematic underpinnings are drawn in part from the dictionary definitions that introduce each section--back cover.

When a Brazilian man's face is disfigured, he attempts a grisly self-surgery in this novel of survival.