"Texas- and Mexico-based author Dagoberto Gilb doesn't care about ivory towers, but he does know how to build them. He started writing short stories while working a construction job at the University of Texas at El Paso and has been going strong ever since. The stories in his latest collection focus on working-class Mexican Americans and are written with Gilb's signature realism, which manages to be both gritty and beautiful. Looking for accomplished, unpretentious fiction that celebrates real people? This is your man."—Michael Schaub, book critic, NPR's Best Books of the Year
"Gilb's rambunctious voice booms through the pages of these collections with volcanic force and unexpected twists and turns. Nothing he writes is uninteresting. . . . By now, it's clear that the credibility of Gilb's fiction comes from writing out of his own experience, and what distinguishes his work from the autofiction that has recently come into vogue is his artistry."—Frank Bergon, Los Angeles Review of Books
"By the time I finished reading the first story 'Gray Cloud on San Jacinto Plaza,' it was clear to me that New Testaments is a great literary work."—Laura Moreno, Bay Area Reporter
"Gilb's latest collection of stories delves deep into the contemporary Chicanx experience, introducing a wide array of characters, each grappling with their own challenges. A family faces the terrifying aftermath of exposure to a mysterious gas, a man confronts his mortality, and a high school dropout flirts with danger. Blending gritty realism with a mythic sensibility, Gilb provides piercing insight into the working-class Mexican American experience."—Alta Journal
"No one writes like Dagoberto Gilb! I loved these energetic, soulful, and hilarious stories that by the end had me wondering if I'd encountered the sublime on the page."—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light
"So alive, so wise, so gritty, sensual, so felt, so many flashes of startling poetry. I kept thinking, I've never encountered a voice quite like this one, it has this reverb that hooks you, that vibrates under the printed words and inside your own blood, what is that? But now I understand: it's pure mastery, truth, beauty, life, it's that power inside this intimate space of a story but that goes on and on and never stops. Dagoberto Gilb is an American great." — Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy: A Novel
"From the first line, Dagoberto Gilb's new story collection captivates readers as if drawn by a perfectly taut silver thread. From one story to the next, each so efficient not a sentence is wasted, readers are swept through youth’s most tantalizing, shining shards of memory until, inescapably, the sandstorms of time render Gilb's characters and their recollections with increasing texture and complexity. By the end, Gilb has fully immersed us in the rich amber depths where pure voice and thought become material, and time, for those precious instants, holds its breath. Dagoberto Gilb again proves to be a masterful mason of literary craft and a foundational storyteller in Chicano and American literature."—Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You
"Gilb is a master of stories concerning people who are constantly reinventing themselves, always trying to escape one delicate dilemma or another. Indeed, the title notwithstanding, most of the stories here involve tribulations worthy of Job, if not a few encounters with Delilah, his actors working-class men and women who are running out of options on the hard paths they’ve followed. . . . A well-crafted summoning of people living ordinary lives on la frontera, in all their sorrow and splendor."—Kirkus Reviews
"Decades ago, I read a book on writing from a Buddhist nun. She said something that stuck with me: that writers had to pour their entire selves onto the page. But the crucial work—what made it art, what made it necessary to the spirit—was the writer then burning themselves out—leaving only their essence, leaving only their energy. These stories in New Testaments are the closest I've seen anybody come to doing that in a very, very, very long time. I often had to stop to re-read a sentence and breathe, because the language was so beautiful I had to hold it in my mouth."—ire'ne lara silva, author of the eaters of flowers, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate
