Foreword Review INDIES Multicultural Award, Silver

Texas Institute of Letters, Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story

Best of Texas 2019, Lone Star Literary Life

Reading the West Award Nominee


How does a Mexican-American, the son of immigrants, a child of the border, la frontera, leave home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? With echoes of Dreiser's American Tragedy and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds which ultimately seem so empty.


Sergio Troncoso is the author of the collections A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and the novels The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust. He's taught at the Yale Writers' Workshop for many years. Troncoso is President of the Texas Institute of Letters and a member of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Alumni Hall of Fame. A Fulbright scholar, he has won numerous awards, including the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, International Latino Book Award, the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize, and the Southwest Book Award. He was born in El Paso, Texas, and attended Harvard College and Yale University, where he earned graduate degrees in international relations and philosophy.