Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction [Paperback]

Urrea, best known for his hard-hitting nonfiction (Across the Wire; Nobody's Son), proves once again to be an eloquent and elegiac spokesman for the down-and-out and the disaffected in this collection of six stories whose settings range from Mexico to the Sioux nation in South Dakota. His protagonists are usually Hispanics and Native Americans whose struggles are documented most touchingly in one of the two longer stories, "A Day in the Life," which describes the plight of a poverty-stricken group of garbage pickers whose lives are torn apart by tragedy after they are forced to move from Mexico City to Tijuana. Urrea turns his attention to the brokenhearted in "Taped to the Sky," in which a man who takes to the road after his wife leaves him breaks down in the middle of Wyoming, where he learns the reason for his journey from the Native American man who helps him. He offers a different perspective on the Native American experience in "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which describes the sorrow of a man who marries a Sioux woman who succumbs to alcoholism, while "Father Returns From the Mountain" is a touching story of a man's attempt to come to terms with his father's death in an auto accident. Urrea is a poetic writer who draws strong characters and wears his literary compassion on his sleeve, and he uses all of his gifts to full advantage here. (Feb.)Forecast: This is a minor outing for Urrea, whose fiction has made less of a splash than his nonfiction. A breakout may be in store for him soon, though Little, Brown is publishing his next novel, which it secured as part of a two-book, six-figure deal.

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An award-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist, Urrea should be required reading for anyone living in the Southwest. -- San Diego Union Tribune, April 14, 2002

Richard Rodriguez says we are writing the stories of a mixed race, code-switching America. Urrea is writing these stories. -- Foreword Magazine, May 2002

Short, direct sentences and pitch-perfect dialogue build into original studies of passion, restlessness or mischief, one detail at a time. -- San Francisco Chronicle, April 14, 2002

I always thought Luis Urrea was six skies rolled into one (I mean that in a good way), and this book proves that he speaks with a multitude of passionate, powerful and hilarious voices. This book is a beautiful kind of crazy. —Sherman Alexie

With this new collection of stories, Luis Urrea makes the short list of essential American writers. His glittering landscapes, which warp and ennoble the human spirit, bring to mind the work of Salman Rushdie. I found myself going back and rereading whole passages; Urrea’s got a way with words that raises the bar for the rest of us. What a marvel of a book! —Demetria Martínez, Mother Tongue

Urrea goes in for the big picture, and there seems to be no world he cannot capture. He writes with wit and ingenuity, and the stories possess a powerful sense of acceleration. With each story I was transported to an intense and fully imagined world. —Robert Boswell