Night at the Fiestas

Honoree, 5 Under 35 2014

Night at the Fiestas cover

W.W. Norton & Company
author photo of Kirstin Valdez Quade. (Photo credit: Holly Andres)
Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award. More about this author >

Get This BOOK

Award Years

Award Status

Award Categories

Set in northern New Mexico, an astonishing, beautifully rendered debut about living in a landscape shaped by love, loss, and violence.

With intensity, dark humor, and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters torn between their desires to escape the past and to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the role of Jesus in a bloody penitential Passion. A young man discovers that his estranged father and a boa constrictor have been squatting in his grandmother’s empty house. A young woman finds herself at an impasse when she is asked to hear her priest’s confession.

Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade’s characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save one another.

media


Kirstin Valdez Quade and Andre Dubus III at the 2014 5 Under 35 Celebration


2014 5 Under 35 Panel Discussion

Top
X