Bulletproof Vest: The Ballad of an Outlaw and His Daughter

(Paperback)

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Maria Venegas had been estranged from her father for fourteen years when she finally made the journey back from the US to Mexico to visit him in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. As they begin spending summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fence posts, he starts to share stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence - from the final conversations he had with his own father and his extradition from the US for murder, to his mother's pride after he shot a man for the first time at age twelve.

In spare, gripping prose, Venegas traces her own life and her father's through the stories she inherited from him and gradually comes to understand the violent undercurrent that has shaped them both.

Reviews

Praise for "Bulletproof Vest""Vividly evocative... [a] love letter written across borders of time and geography from an Americanized daughter to her quintessentially Mexican father. ...Full of richly described moments... [that seem] both real and like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is a testament to Venegas's prose that we experience all this not as sensationalistic fantasy but as a way of life." --Zachary Lazar, "New York Times Book Review""[A]s amazing as that emotional honesty is, it's the brilliantly executed narrative structure -- the stubborn refusal to give in to established perceptions about the memoir -- that makes the book truly amazing. It's likely "Bulletproof Vest" will be taught in college classes for years to come, not just because of its brutal and heartfelt prose, but because of its technical brilliance. There are more than a thousand stories in this book, each one holding the others up and collapsing in on themselves. It's a stunning achievement, and it proves, beautifully, what the memoir can be." --Michael Schaub, "National Public Radio""Maria Venegas beautifully charts the landscape of her father's absence. By mapping his internal exile, she finds a way to their shared home, one known best by heart." --Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of "Random Family""Maria Venegas is a transfixing writer. Her voice is tough, vulnerable, humorous, insightful and always rousingly alive. Whether writing about Chicago or Mexico, she possesses an extraordinary eye and feeling for place, and her characters are vivid expressions of those places. American readers have rarely encountered a depiction of Mexican lives so true, unsentimental, and moving as in this emotionally complex story of an Americanized young woman and her outlaw father who lives by the hard violent codes of Mexico "profundo."" --Francisco Goldman, author of" Say Her Name""This is a contemporary "corrido"--a ballad of America, a love song to Mexico, and an intertwined family history, al

Author Bio

MARIA VENEGEAS was born in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico and immigrated illegally to the US at four years old. Bulletproof Vest was excerpted in Granta and in the Guardian in 2009. Her short stories have also appeared in Ploughshares and Huizache. She lives in New York.