The Consequences: Stories

by Manuel Munoz

Overview

Winner of the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

Finalist for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize

Finalist for the 2023 Balcones Prize for Fiction

Longlisted for the 2022 Story Prize

Shimmering stories set in California’s Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer.

“Her immediate concern was money.” So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz’s dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California’s Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.

These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and 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, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It’s a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644452066
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/18/2022
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	186,245
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two previous collections and a novel. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, three O. Henry Awards, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories. A native of Dinuba, California, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/08/2022

Obligations fall heavily upon the characters in Muñoz’s deeply affecting collection (after What You See in the Dark). Set in and around Fresno, Calif., in the 1980s, the stories center on farmworkers drawn to—and frequently expelled from—the Central Valley and their Mexican American children. In “Anyone Can Do It,” a young mother whose husband was swept up in an immigration raid begins working in the fields, where she faces a shocking betrayal. In “The Reason Is Because,” a teenage mother spends her days caring for her baby and longing for the boredom of high school, back when “her daydreaming didn’t seem so pointless.” In “What Kind of Fool Am I,” a young woman realizes the contours of her life are largely set and will revolve around taking care of her younger brother, who pursues his own escape from familial burdens with dangerous, older men. The future is similarly straitened in “Compromisos,” in which a husband and father tries to return to his household after his lover shuts down any dreams of a future together. By making subtle connections between the stories, Muñoz adds texture to characters even if they’re not at the center, and throughout, Muñoz delivers breathtaking views into his characters’ hardscrabble world, and evokes the heat of their yearning. This packs a hell of a punch. Agent: Stuart Bernstein, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Muñoz’s prose is shining and hypnotic, and suffused with care and tenderness. This is one of the best short story collections to come around in recent years.”—Michael Schaub, NPR.org, Best Books of 2022

“Hauntingly simple. . . . In these surprising, vivid stories, worries are deeply felt but not often spoken aloud, and obligation to kin and the need to survive outweigh much else.”—The Atlantic, “10 Most Thought-Provoking Books of 2022”

“This collection pushes the reader to appreciate life’s small moments of unexpected tenderness with fresh eyes.”—Brenda Peynado, New York Times Book Review

“The fact that a mind as fine and compassionate as Muñoz’s exists lifts me up.”—George Saunders

“Gay, straight, American-born or American-dreaming, the characters in this collection exist on the verge of oblivion, but the book out-Steinbecks Steinbeck in its manifestation of the human in places we too rarely dare look.”—Oprah Daily

“Simply put, Muñoz’s stories are as observant as they are revealing — full of nuanced subtext and bracingly honest depictions of vulnerability and hope, love and regret, and everything in between. They deserve all the attention they can get.”—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle

“Muñoz brings tenderness and immediacy to these fully realised stories of secrets and concealment, longings, vulnerability, and imperfect escape, creating an expansive and memorable world.”—David Hayden, The Guardian

“Muñoz’s luminous story collection . . . portrays a community of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. . . . Their daily difficulties are tenderly laid bare. . . . Muñoz once worked in the same fields, as did his parents and siblings, and his empathetic stories convey a realistic sense of the toll such labor takes on bodies and minds.”—Becky Meloan, The Washington Post

“Manuel Muñoz’s third story collection solidifies his position as a master of the short story. The Consequences offers insights not just into relationships in families, neighborhoods, and communities, but among strangers who meet on a bus and come together to share the struggles of 21st-century immigrant life.”—Jane Ciabattari, Lit Hub

“Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“...Muñoz delivers breathtaking views into his characters’ hardscrabble world, and evokes the heat of their yearning. This packs a hell of a punch.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Lucid and elegantly written, The Consequences tells the stories of characters who ache for one another or for ephemeral moments of release; who ache — bodily — from a life spent harvesting the sweetness that will grace other tables.”—Los Angeles Times

“Full of nuance and heart, Muñoz’s writing is honest and unforgettable, marking him as a master storyteller.”—Electric Literature, “Favorite Story Collections of 2022”

“Muñoz’s writing quietly dazzles with its unforced, patient, and lyrical lines.”—Erin Douglass, Christian Science Monitor

“Haunting, powerful, humble, precise, this collection shook my being. Manuel Muñoz is a great American writer who sees with his heart—as great as Juan Rulfo in writing about the poor. I wish I had written these stories.”—Sandra Cisneros

“These stories are evanescent, unforgettable, taking us deep into California’s Central Valley, the homeland Manuel Muñoz has for years given to the world as a place of glimmering mystery, tule fog, and the yearning of his characters for love and absolution. Each story reveals an entire life. Muñoz is one of the best writers working in America.”—Susan Straight

“Manuel Muñoz’s stories are melancholy, assured, and unforgettable. Like a porch light at midnight, they strike a circle of stark dreamlike clarity around their characters, even as the darkness gathers in.”—Colin Barrett

“I envy that I didn’t write these stories myself. . . . [Manuel Muñoz] really just did his highest work, his genius highest work. And I’m in admiration.”—Sandra Cisneros, The Independent

Electric Lit "11 Books About Seasonal and Migrant Farmworkers in America"

From the Publisher

★ 2022-07-27
From three-time O. Henry winner Muñoz, a new and often luminous collection, his third.

Many of the stories gathered here are set in the 1980s and '90s and feature people living in severely straitened and threatened circumstances: the families of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California's Central Valley who are routinely rounded up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, repatriated, and then return, again and again; gay men in an age of AIDS and widespread homophobia; trapped and housebound teens. In "The Reason Is Because," we meet a high school girl forced by pregnancy to drop out of school. She lives with her mother and her newborn in near isolation, and the only hope for change anyone seems able even to imagine is a marriage to the swaggering, not-very-bright, and mostly uninterested father. In "Anyone Can Do It," the wife of a fruit picker who (though American-born) has been hauled away with his co-workers by La Migra is swindled out of her chief asset by a neighbor she'd thought an ally. Another standout is the moving title story, in which Mark, a water-company clerk, falls in love with Teddy, a sweet-tempered, beautiful young man who's been hustling in LA, and is surprised when Teddy seems not only willing, but eager to leave the glitz of the city to settle with him in Fresno. Eventually it's revealed that Teddy is dying of AIDS. Mark kicks him out and then—tortured—drives all the way to the small Texas town where Teddy was born and where, it turns out, he has just died. Perhaps best of all is the closer, "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Here we meet a rule-following Texas teen who bristles at the strictures of home and the narrowness of her prospects but sees little way around them. Her bolder or just more desperate younger brother keeps running off, looking for a wider world that might accept him. Her task is to find him and bring him home—until, that is, her brother manages to get far enough away to provide escape velocity for her, too.

Nuanced, thoughtful, often moving stories.

Kirkus Reviews