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Josh Barkan

Goodreads Author

Born

Santa Monica, California, The United States

Website

http://www.joshbarkan.com

Genre

Fiction, Memoir, Nonfiction

Member Since

October 2016

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JOSH BARKAN won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Award for memoir. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He has taught creative writing at Harvard, NYU, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Hollins University and MIT. His books include the novel Blind Speed and short story collections Before Hiroshima and Mexico (Hogarth/Penguin Random House)—named one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal. His latest book is the memoir Wonder Travels. He lives in Boston.

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I'm really enjoying your book Mexico: Stories. Are any of these based on true stories? I do recall many moons ago hearing of El Chapo Guzman and his cronies taking over a restaurant so it made me wonder. I can't even begin to imagine living where cartels run everything. Very scary existence. Just curious.

Josh Barkan Thanks for the question. You are right--there have definitely been rumors that El Chapo went into some restaurants and took them over while he ate. Mo…moreThanks for the question. You are right--there have definitely been rumors that El Chapo went into some restaurants and took them over while he ate. Most of those rumors related to him in his home state of Sinaloa, but while I was living in Mexico City people started talking about him going in to a restaurant in Mexico City. I fictionalized this rumor. There never was a request by El Chapo for a perfect meal, and as far as I know, certainly not to an American chef. Often, when I write stories, I mix a variety of people I have seen and events I have heard about or experienced, directly. The chef in the story, for example, was inspired by a chef I met while I lived in Pittsburgh, in a totally different context. He was raising vegetables in an urban garden in Braddock, PA, where people are trying to revitalize a steel town that has lost most of the steel mills there. In some of the other stories of the collection the violence came out of more direct experience. In "The Painting Professor," for example, a friend of mine who is a painter (female and young, not like the protagonist of the story) has a painting studio in Puebla, and she described to me the shooting around her family compound. I had been to the compound many times, so that led to the story. In "The Kidnapping," my wife (who is Mexican), had her longtime dentist kidnapped. He was forced to take money out of ATMs every day and was then beaten up, in particular because he is gay, and then he was thrown out onto the street. But rather than have a dentist in such an event, I began to imagine a person more like a friend of mine who is a painter, who lives in the center of Mexico City. In the case of a story like "I Want to Live," it was reported in the press that a beauty queen was married to a narco and that she died defending her husband. That inspired the character Esmeralda. In the story "The God of Common Names," my wife told me about two real high school students in love, who had parents who were rival narcos. But I have no idea what school that was in. Then I thought of a totally different protagonist who was married to someone who was an Orthodox Jew, which came out of my own experiences when I first came to Mexico City when I met some of the Orthodox community in Polanco. In the story "Acapulco," a good friend of my wife's had his first cousin killed in Zihuatanejo, after being taken out to parties with a narco. That person was an architect, though I have never met him. So there is quite a mix of different places, reality, events and fiction in my stories. It is important to remember that these are definitely fiction stories--I take full liberty as I write to make up characters and explore their personal problems. But there is definitely quite a bit of "reality" in these stories.(less)

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Kudos on your spectacular book MEXICO. Will you be writing another book composed of a collection of short stories about somewhere different or any type of book in general? Your writing is excellent.

Josh Barkan Thanks, Angie. I'm glad you connected with "Mexico." I'm working on a novel now, set in NY. If you look a little below on the page about "Mexico," in …moreThanks, Angie. I'm glad you connected with "Mexico." I'm working on a novel now, set in NY. If you look a little below on the page about "Mexico," in the section with questions, you can see how I describe the new book. I'll be working on the novel this summer. Thanks for reading.
Josh(less)

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Josh Barkan’s books

Average rating: 3.32 · 491 ratings · 161 reviews · 7 distinct works • Similar authors

	Mexico: Stories 3.30 avg rating — 430 ratings — published 2017 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Before Hiroshima: The Confession of Murayama Kazuo and Other Stories 3.66 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 2011 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blind Speed 2.95 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 2008 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Wonder Travels: A Memoir 3.58 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2023	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Plastic Surgeon it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Mexico; a collection of stories 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blind Speed: A Novel by Josh Barkan (2008-05-08) by Josh Barkan (Goodreads Author), Unknown Author 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Mexico: Stories

by Josh Barkan (Goodreads Author)

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Jan 30, 2017 01:24PM

Quotes by Josh Barkan (?)

“There was something else amusing about the house: the irony that the most important battle of the American Revolution--the shoot-out at the Old North Bridge--had taken place just outside the residence of the pacifist Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, Emerson was born after the battle in 1803, but his grandfather had been living in the house at the time of the Revolution, and the juxtaposition of such pacifism against such violence struck Paul as a symbol of an eternal truth about American history: Nixon, that goofy Vietnam War mortician, was right: the silent majority ruled (not the rebellious, pacifist fringe); the majority killed for their property; and there was nothing really revolutionary about the minutemen , who won a war and took over the entire country to ultimately build fast-food restaurants and Disneyland while abolitionists, pacifists, hippies, and environmentalists were left to make well-intended flatulent noises--to write poems such as Ginsberg's "Howl"--in books for other defeated noisemakers. ”
― Josh Barkan, Blind Speed

tags: concord, disneyland, fast-food, pacifism, ralph-waldo-emerson, shot-heard-around-the-world

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“It may sound crazy, but people like to eat what they are. If they have voracious habits they can't change, they like sweet foods. If they are tight with their money, they prefer to eat bread and mashed potatoes. If they are flamboyant they like to eat elaborately thin vegetables, fried and piled up high like a fancy hat. We are all cannibals, eating the secrets we have within.”
― Josh Barkan, Mexico

tags: eating, food

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