"También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time...

"The U.S.-Mexico border has earned an enduring reputation as a site of violence. During the past twenty years in particular, the drug wars -- fueled by the international movement of narcotics and vast sums of money -- have burned an abiding image of the border as a place of endemic danger into the consciousness of both countries. By the media, popular culture, and politicians, mayhem and brutality are often portrayed as the unavoidable birthright...

"Powerful. . . impressive. . . [an] epic of the 1840s frontier." -Dallas Morning News With soaring and masterful prose, James Carlos Blake brings to life an enthralling historical time and place-and a cast of memorable characters-in a stunning tale of dark instinct, blood reckoning, and fates forged in the zeal of America's "Manifest Destiny." The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home...

This anthology combines writings about the impact of drug violence on life and culture along the U.S.-Mexico border. It reveals how this fragile way of life between two cultures, languages, and countries, has been undermined by the drug trade and the crime that accompanies it, with ramifications far beyond the border region.

Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, "mere self-expression." Berman's visual investigations of the everyday...