Last night after grading and preparing for classroom workshops I had time to finish Luis Alberto Urrea’s short story collection Six Kinds of Sky. I was unfamiliar with Urrea’s work but I’ve been reading through my list of Latino authors and I have to say there was much to admire. I enjoyed “Mr Mendoza’s Paint Brush” perhaps most out of the collection. Urrea gives a mix of straight story telling and farce and perhaps a bit of the surreal mixing in the story. This seemed to be a constant throughout the stories. I also enjoyed “Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses”–a story about a white guy mourning the loss of his wife. A nice mix of the tragic and the beautiful. I was also intrigued by the final non-fiction essay of the book “Amazing Grace: Story and Writer.” I liked the insight into Urrea’s craft and thought process.
