Pig Cookies and Other Stories

by Alberto Alvaro Ríos

Stories deal with the problems and uncertainties caused by conflicts between public and private life

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1995

About the author

In 1952, Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born on the American side of the city of Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona in 1974 and a MFA in Creative Writing from the same institution in 1979.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); The Theater of Night (2007); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Teodora Luna's Two Kisses(1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), which won the 1981 Walt Whitman Award, selected by Donald Justice.

Other books by Ríos include Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), The Curtain of Trees: Stories (1999), Pig Cookies and Other Stories (1995), and The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart (1984), which won the Western States Book Award.

Ríos's poetry has been set to music in a cantata by James DeMars called "Toto's Say," and on an EMI release, "Away from Home." He was also featured in the documentary Birthwrite: Growing Up Hispanic. His work has been included in more than ninety major national and international literary anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

"Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie and magical perception," wrote the judges of the 2002 National Book Awards, "and of the threshold between this world and the world just beyond."

He holds numerous awards, including six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, the Arizona Governor's Arts Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Since 1994 he has been Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1982. He lives in Chandler, Arizona.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful short story collection set in a small Mexican village during the early 1900s, interspersed with magical realism that really just feels like the magic of ordinary life.

[John Cates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories - adventures of a serious of characters set in a village in northern Mexico - has a touch of "magical realism"

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pig Cookies is a beautiful, poetic, funny, heart-warming, heart-wrenching series of interconnected stories. Through them, Ríos reveals an uncanny ability to capture the personality and soul of a town, as well as the individual characters who are molded by it. There is magic not only in the tales themselves but in the detail and structuring of the language and in the art of storytelling itself. The stories and their characters become part of the reader's memories, as if lived rather than read.

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly charming, and perhaps my favorite magical realism book that I've read yet. I stumbled across it in a used bookstore in Albuquerque and picked it up because of the title... childish or not, I love those pig cookies too. But the series of interlinked stories with sympathetic characters who come and go, age and are young again was far more of a delight than I was expecting from having literally chosen a book for its cover. The reader gets drawn into the life of the village and its inhabitants, their hopes, chances, romances, and humorously inevitable fates. You're rooting for everyone, and other than the difficult introduction with the circus, it mostly works out well for the characters.

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my blog post about Alberto Alvaro Rios, Pig Cookies, and Arizona State University http://www.hazelfoster.com/2011/09/07....

[Jens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just beautiful.