Muñoz, Manuel

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two previous collections and a novel. He has received a Whiting Award and three O. Henry Awards and has appeared in Best American Short Stories. The stories in The Consequences (Graywolf Press) are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns surrounding Fresno. In them, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables and are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by “la migra” – their quotidian struggles, and the immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters – straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old – are 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 subsequently, perhaps literally, haunted. In The Consequences, obligations can shape, support, and sometimes derail us.