The Consequences: Stories

Winner of the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalist for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Story Prize Shimmering stories set in Californias Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer. Her immediate concern was money. So begins the first story in Manuel Muozs dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to Californias Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal. These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his charactersstraight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and oldare tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequentlyperhaps literallyhaunted. In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. Its a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.