7.8 /10 1 Votes
3.7/5 Barnes & Noble Originally published 2012 Country United States of America | 4.1/5 Goodreads Language English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Awards PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2013), Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction (2013), Stonewall Book Award (2014) Similar Benjamin Alire Sáenz books, Other books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club is a collection of short stories by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, published in 2012 by Cinco Puntos Press.
The book compiles seven short stories, all set in the Hispanic/Latino community in El Paso, Texas in the United States and its neighbouring city of Juárez, Chihuahua in Mexico.
The Kentucky Club, a real-life bar a few blocks south of the border crossing in Juárez, appears in all seven stories as a linking motif. In addition, all seven stories touch in some way on themes of survival, of trying to live through pain, grief and loss and of the struggle to find and maintain love, both within the protagonists' birth families and in their sexual or romantic relationships. Several also touch on the outbreak of violent crime that engulfed Juárez in the 1990s, and the ways in which that fractured the interrelated cross-border culture of the two cities.
Awards
The book won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2013, making Sáenz the first Latino writer ever to win the award, and also won a Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Fiction category at the 2013 Lambda Literary Awards. It was also named at a 2014 Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association.