Sky over El Nido

Stories by C. M. Mayo

Reviews

"C.M. Mayo writes some of the most exquisitely fashioned, perfectly measured prose alive in the world today. Her stories glitter with delicious odd details. They feel electrically charged, richly mysterious, and rhythmic. I love her layering of cultures, her offbeat humor, her potent instinct for voices. Bravo! Captivating! Yes, yes, yes!"
—Naomi Shihab Nye

"The haywire circuits of our whole electrically but not ethically connected global village stand exposed in Mayo’s work."
—Commonwealth


More / Hide

Description
“Mother rescued the three zebras that escaped from the London zoo”—so begins the first story in this whirlwind collection by C. M. Mayo. Though Mayo’s characters ricochet around the globe in search of diversion, money, enlightenment, cachet, and escape, she sets many of the stories in Sky Over El Nido in Mexico. This is not the gringo’s Mexico of margaritas, mariachis, and inscrutable house servants, but a fin-de-siècle world where a Mexican boy who guards tourists’ cars for small change wears a T-shirt that says “Six Flags Over Georgia.” Mayo’s strangely beautiful yet disturbing stories reveal characters who envision the solutions to their lives in a world where nothing is stable, nothing can be nailed down, and we are all suddenly, dizzyingly faced with sharing the same pitiless sky.
Series/imprint:
Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Page count: 176 pp.
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
  

Paper
List price: $18.95
978-0-8203-2119-6
1999

View Cart



C. M. Mayo lives in Mexico City. She is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California and the novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire.