Witches.
Eggs & severed heads.
Big cats, earthquakes!
All the men are dead.
In Marytza K. Rubio’s genre-defying debut collection of short stories, the characters—which span from women to animals to the moon—negotiate with nature, invoking Mexican American myths, mystics, and magic. Maria, Maria & Other Stories stretches across the Americas, reimagines the boundaries of reality and fiction, and expands upon the spaces between life and death.
Rubio confects her moving, disturbing, and intense stories in a variety of styles, voices, and tones, from dark parody to heart-wrenching, grotesque, and violent yet touching.
Many of these 10 tales defy categorization and blur genre boundaries. A duo searches the multiverse to find meaning in senseless death in “Carlos Across Space and Time.” “Brujería for Beginners” sees a magical teacher attempting to steer an unruly class. Generations of Marias work to make sense of their legacies and supernatural abilities within a dystopic jungle in “Maria, Maria.”
CUCO
During the COVID summer of 2020, Rogue Artists Ensemble and LA Puppetry Guild collaborated with PEN America to create "Puppets & Prose," a series of videos where visual artist and puppeteers animated original stories by PEN Emerging Voices alumni.
Cuco is excerpted from an unpublished YA novel I wrote about a Chicana tarot card reader.