The scrublands of South Texas, the warm coastland of the Gulf of Mexico, a cinderblock flophouse near the produce fields of South Florida: all are borderlands of mixed blood and spilled blood, of generations forged in fight, failure, and hope. In this extraordinary collection of short fictions, the acclaimed author of In the Rogue Blood and Red Grass River journeys from the nineteenth century Mexican frontier to the borderlands of the present day in eight unforgettable tales of love, vengeance, and violence.

Within these pages we meet Don Sebastian Cabrillo Mayor Cortes y Mendoza, a powerful and iron-willed landowner, now reduced to howling at the moon from behind madhouse bars; an illegal immigrant whose offer of love from a flawed beauty will echo both in his future and in his past; a Texas woman born into a life that will either kill her or take a lifetime to survive; and many more of the people occupying the Borderlands. Bold, honest, and humane, these magnificent stories represent some of the best writing from one of the most original and authentic voices in contemporary American fiction.