Blue Willow Bookshop welcomes David Meischen to celebrate his new book, Nopalito, Texas: Stories.
In this stunning debut story collection, everyone’s got the blues but nobody is willing to sing it. Evelyn Smith, Candace Lambert, and Dorene Wahrmund chafe against rigid small-town expectations. Others in hardscrabble Nopalito find themselves fenced in—an aging gay liquor store owner estranged among his neighbors, a mother and son bound by mutual resentment, two neighboring farm boys attracted to each other. Their stories are driven by desperation, rarely spoken, that troubles the community’s inhabitants as it nudges them toward connection, toward moments of hope. Meischen draws these characters with a tenderness that belies the hardness of their lives.
David will read and sign copies of Nopalito, Texas. He is also the author of the award-winning poetry collection Anyone’s Son. He is the cofounder and coeditor of Dos Gatos Press.