James Carlos Blake

Award-winning author James Carlos Blake is one of America's most highly regarded living authors of western fiction. 

Books By James Carlos Blake

Borderlands: Short Fictions By James Carlos Blake

Seven stories and a novella from a master author of the American West

Dolores and her mother have not seen Dolores’s daddy for five days. Dolores—whom daddy calls Sugargirl—leaps to greet him when she hears his heavy steps on the front porch. Daddy is drunk, battered, and smells of cheap perfume; his return is cut short when Momma chases him out of the house with a hot iron. A few years later, when Momma is dead and Daddy is serving a thirty-to-life stint in the state penitentiary, Dolores gets a letter addressed to Sugargirl. She is sixteen, on her own, and life will not get easier from here.

This novella and the seven accompanying stories represent the finest short fiction of celebrated western author James Carlos Blake. These tales span centuries and continents, but the characters share a common trait: They are citizens of the borderlands, from whence death is the only escape.

  • Publishers Weekly

    “This is gritty, raw, bare-knuckled fiction, blazing with an extraordinary kind of violence, and certainly not for the faint of heart.” 

  • Tucson Weekly

    “While his works are frequently brutal and bloody, James Carlos Blake is a formidable writer [and] a deft stylist, welding the language with power and authority.” 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  • Biography

    • James Carlos Blake (b. 1947) is one of America's most highly regarded living authors of western fiction. He was born in Mexico, and his family moved regularly when he was a child, living in various towns along the border and coast before finally settling in Texas when Blake was six. After a stint in the army, Blake attended the University of South Florida and received a master's degree from Bowling Green State University. He would later teach at both of these universities, but in 1997 he left teaching to write fulltime. 

      Blake's first novel, The Pistoleer, was published in 1995 to overwhelming acclaim. Its unusual format—with each chapter told from a different character's perspective—caused critics to dub it an unusually promising debut. Since then Blake has written eight novels and one collection of stories, most of which are inspired by real-life characters from the American West. He lives and works in Arizona.
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