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Borderlands: Short Fictions
The award-winning author of In the Rogue Blood presents a collection of eight pieces of short fiction that explores issues of love, violence, and vengeance in the stories of a colorful cast of characters who make their home amid the harsh world of the Borderlands. Original.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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133 people want to read
About the author
James Carlos Blake
22 books211 followersJames Carlos Blake was an American writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His work has received extensive critical favor and several notable awards. He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” as well as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.” He was a recipient of the University of South Florida's Distinguished Humanities Alumnus Award and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 2, 2021
My first James Carlos Blake, but definitely not my last. This is a collection of short stories that are set on or around the border between Mexico and the United States. The borderlands is a geographical location where two countries and cultures come into contact, but the stories are about people caught between two worlds. It is the mental borderland more than the physical one that is the issue here. I really didn’t much like the first story, but then from that point on the stories got better and better. Well worth reading!
June 27, 2023
This is an another astounding piece of work by JCB. This work is someting of a departure from his previous work i.e., "Pancho Villa", "The Pistoleer" et al insofar as "Borderlands" consists of several pieces of short fiction and the characters are contemporary. Blake again plumbs the depths of people living on the edge, struggling against forces outside their control as they live their lives in the mixed culture of the south Borderlands. If you're a fan of JCB's work, the Preface offers an unstinting view into the author's background, especially his childhood and the geography he himself inhabited in the border-lands between Mexico and the US. This background sheds valuable insight for the stories that follow and inform the authors' motivation for painting these bleak heartrending portraits that you can't put down.
April 3, 2020
I'm not big on short story collections, but I savored these. Excellent.
May 6, 2020
Very good stories, especially the last one, Texas Woman Blues
January 25, 2024
A collection of stories set in and around the desolate area called the boderlands between US and Mexico. Nothing uplifting in here, pretty much an exploration into the dark side of the lives of those caught between the two cultures. I thought the first 4 or 5 stories were basic and lacked substance but the remaining few were well worth reading, especially the last one (which is essentially 40% of the book as it clocks in at about 100 pages) called Texas Woman Blues. Pretty grim stuff in this one but captivating.
December 3, 2020
The borderland, you quickly learn, is a state of mind, a psychological orientation more than a strict geographic setting. The people in these stories--as well as in the novella at the end--all seek to latch on to something. Anything, almost. But it escapes them. Some demon in their mind or their spirit continually splits them off from everyone around them. Even those closest to them. Blake identifies this sense of being an outsider as something he is at one with.
But as much as this is a book that explores the psyche, it is also a set of stories and sketches that produce a vivid atmosphere of time and place. And the time stretches from early in the last century down until the mid 1970s in the novella, "Texas Woman Blues." If you know the region, you not only are familiar with these people but the world they inhabit. The sultry nights on the Texas coast and in Florida. The dry, scorching desert wind that blows in from northern Mexico during the summer, all the way to the Oklahoma. And the border, the river that snakes through it all, more a symbol than a real barrier.
What I think I like best about these stories is the times it conjures up, in particular the Texas before the 1980s, in the 1950s and 1960s and on into the 1970s. Mexican migrants passed back and forth without paying much attention to official permission to do so. And sometimes their children would come with them. I remember in fifth grade, Alberto, the fourteen or fifteen year old son of a migrant one day plopped down in the middle of our class of ten year olds. This was 1965. Far from being isolated, Alberto was a hit. Quite literally. During the afternoon, playing baseball, he could slam line drives almost to the bottom of the school building some 350 feet away. He could also snag line drives. With his bare hands. And he roamed centerfield like another coming of Willie Mays. But almost as soon as he came, he was gone. Back home. Back to Mexico. But he had a few weeks in an American school. Gained a little English. Maybe learned a few other things as well. It was an opportunity. A limited one. But you take what you can get. And now, all these years later, after reading James Carlos Blake's stories, I have at least a glimpse of what was going on on the other side of life in the suburbs.
But as much as this is a book that explores the psyche, it is also a set of stories and sketches that produce a vivid atmosphere of time and place. And the time stretches from early in the last century down until the mid 1970s in the novella, "Texas Woman Blues." If you know the region, you not only are familiar with these people but the world they inhabit. The sultry nights on the Texas coast and in Florida. The dry, scorching desert wind that blows in from northern Mexico during the summer, all the way to the Oklahoma. And the border, the river that snakes through it all, more a symbol than a real barrier.
What I think I like best about these stories is the times it conjures up, in particular the Texas before the 1980s, in the 1950s and 1960s and on into the 1970s. Mexican migrants passed back and forth without paying much attention to official permission to do so. And sometimes their children would come with them. I remember in fifth grade, Alberto, the fourteen or fifteen year old son of a migrant one day plopped down in the middle of our class of ten year olds. This was 1965. Far from being isolated, Alberto was a hit. Quite literally. During the afternoon, playing baseball, he could slam line drives almost to the bottom of the school building some 350 feet away. He could also snag line drives. With his bare hands. And he roamed centerfield like another coming of Willie Mays. But almost as soon as he came, he was gone. Back home. Back to Mexico. But he had a few weeks in an American school. Gained a little English. Maybe learned a few other things as well. It was an opportunity. A limited one. But you take what you can get. And now, all these years later, after reading James Carlos Blake's stories, I have at least a glimpse of what was going on on the other side of life in the suburbs.
June 27, 2023
About half of this book is a single novella Texas Woman Blues. This is a masterpiece of whore noir. Sugargirl's nightmare life is continual woe.
The second-longest story Runaway Horses, is a stampede of rage, vengeance, torture, and madness. It is a first-person historical fiction set in Old Mexico and the most riproaring short story I have ever read.
The rest of the collection was forgettable. Not quite, I should mention a third story Aliens in the Garden. It was harrowing mojado noir but seemed to be unfinished.
"Any girl sells her ass is trash and just asking for trouble. Who you think cares she finds it?"The many fem-insights would have made me believe it was written by a woman (but what do I know? I'm a guy). I sorta knew how it was going to end when I spotted Chekhov's Colt Cobra 38 in her toolbox. Texas Woman Blues might have been famous if it was a stand-alone novella, instead of stuck in this motley collection.
The second-longest story Runaway Horses, is a stampede of rage, vengeance, torture, and madness. It is a first-person historical fiction set in Old Mexico and the most riproaring short story I have ever read.
The rest of the collection was forgettable. Not quite, I should mention a third story Aliens in the Garden. It was harrowing mojado noir but seemed to be unfinished.
December 26, 2019
An impressive collection of 8 stories. Some as complex and complete as a novel, other short as a breath, but all fascinating.
The autobiographical introduction reveals the source of all Blake's work and his paradox of reconciling brutality and sensitivity together..
The autobiographical introduction reveals the source of all Blake's work and his paradox of reconciling brutality and sensitivity together..
October 9, 2023
Wow! ¡Qué buena lectura! El género no me mata en absoluto porque, de lo contrario, serían 5 estrellas sólidamente.
¡Qué manera de escribir la de este señor!
Aquí 10 impresiones que tuve del libro
¡Qué manera de escribir la de este señor!
Aquí 10 impresiones que tuve del libro
February 19, 2025
Good Stuff
This guy really knows how to tell a story.
I particularly liked "Referee" and "Texas Woman Blues".
I can tell you that the ending of "Texas Woman Blues" (the last one) is sure nothing I've ever read or heard before. Scared the devil out of me and gives me a hankerin' to offer some advice: .
Second Time ...
... for Runaway Horses, Referee, and Texas Woman Blues.
Runaway Horses: way, way too Mexican for me; the whole damned thing is in Mexico and everyone in the story acts very Mexicanish. Maybe for people living in, say, New Mexico, this all seems normal, Business As Usual, but not for regular, real, Americans.
Referee: my favorite. But I have a weakness for stories about some little event in your childhood that makes you a nut-case for the rest of your life. lol
Texas Woman Blues: too grim for me.
This guy really knows how to tell a story.
I particularly liked "Referee" and "Texas Woman Blues".
I can tell you that the ending of "Texas Woman Blues" (the last one) is sure nothing I've ever read or heard before. Scared the devil out of me and gives me a hankerin' to offer some advice: .
Second Time ...
... for Runaway Horses, Referee, and Texas Woman Blues.
Runaway Horses: way, way too Mexican for me; the whole damned thing is in Mexico and everyone in the story acts very Mexicanish. Maybe for people living in, say, New Mexico, this all seems normal, Business As Usual, but not for regular, real, Americans.
Referee: my favorite. But I have a weakness for stories about some little event in your childhood that makes you a nut-case for the rest of your life. lol
Texas Woman Blues: too grim for me.
July 4, 2018
I loved this collection. Reread it often.
August 27, 2012
The youth of Juan Carlos Blake, as the introductory essay to this volume of fiction describes it, took place along the border that used to separate Mexico from the United States. I wrote "used to" because at the time Blake writes of, the Border Patrol was the greatest threat to border crossers, and not, as it sometimes is now, an escape from the murderous desert and the murderous cartels. The historical pieces with which Blake opens the volume, "Runaway Horses" and "Three Tales of the Revolution" are more convincing than the modern stories that follow it, as if the more constricted emotional range of revenge and violence suits his style and perceptions better than the more nuanced and complex modern border. The exception is the end piece, the riveting, if not entirely convincing (in its denouement, not most of its grinding details) "Texas Woman Blues", the tale of a short, troubled life.
May 5, 2013
Rough characters living in a raw environment.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews