Uli’s first flight, a late-night joy ride with his brother, changes their lives forever when the engine stops and the boys crash land, with “Texas to the right and Mexico to the left.” Before the accident, Uli juggled his status as both an undocumented immigrant and a high school track star in Harlingen, Texas, desperately hoping to avoid being deported like his father. His mother Araceli spent her time waiting for her husband. His older brother Cuauhtémoc, a former high-school track star turned drop-out, learned to fly a crop duster, spraying pesticide over their home in the citrus grove.
After the crash, Cuauhtémoc wakes up bound and gagged, wondering where he is. Uli comes to in a hospital, praying that it’s on the American side of the border. And their mother finds herself waiting for her sons as well as her missing husband. Araceli knows that she has to go back to the country she left behind in order to find her family.
In Mexico, each is forced to navigate the complexities of their past and an unknown world of deprivation and violence. Ruthless drug cartels force Cuauhtémoc to fly drugs. “If a brick goes missing, Cuauhtémoc dies. If a plane goes missing, Cuauhtémoc dies. If Cuauhtémoc goes missing, they find Cuauhtémoc (wherever he’s at) and Cuauhtémoc dies.” If they can’t find him, they will kill his mother. They have photos of her in Matamoros to prove they can enforce the threat. Meanwhile, Uli returns to his family’s home in San Miguel and finds a city virtually abandoned, devastated by battles between soldiers, cartels and militias that vie for control.
Vividly portraying the impact of international drug smuggling on the innocent, Peña’s debut novel also probes the loss of talented individuals and the black market machines fed with the people removed and shut out of America. Ultimately, Bang is a riveting tale about ordinary people forced to do dangerous, unimaginable things.
Click here to listen to an interview with Daniel Peña about Bang: A Novel.
Click here to read an interview with Daniel Peña in the Chicago Review of Books.
Click here to read a review of Bang in the Texas Observer.
Winner, 2019 NACCS Tejas Foco Fiction Award
In the Margins’ 2019 Advocacy/Social Justice Award Finalist
“The adroit characterizations and alternating points of view advance a memorable narrative about overlooked populations in America that are victimized by drug smuggling. Peña examines the symbiosis of the United States and Mexico and makes painfully clear the negative effects of international trade—legal and illegal. This is a notable and compassionate novel.”—Publishers Weekly
“Peña provides a window into the struggles of immigrants on the border as well as the violent drug war fueling the migration. A piercing tale of lives broken by border violence.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Bang is such a timely novel that offers devastating insights into how communities adapt to severe shifts in culture and society.”—NBC Latino
“Daniel Peña’s debut novel reminds me of a bantamweight boxer. Lean and compact, it is packed with energy, ready to land blow after punch after jab on any reader who dares to underestimate it.”—Texas Observer
“Peña uses his prodigious gift for detail to take us inside the horrors that befall this family as a result of the fateful flight that started as a dare between brothers. Bang is a grim yet gripping debut that hinges on the desperate hope of its characters.”—Austin American-Statesman
“A riveting exploration of a family caught in turmoil. [Peña does] an incredible job of capturing the state of fear that accompanies being undocumented.”—Chicago Review of Books
“Daniel Peña wrote a wonderful novel that is not about showing us yet again the drug-dealing world. It’s a book that carves deep into our pain, that talks about the burden of our origins.”—The Quarterly Conversation
“To everyone who reads this novel, especially in a complex political climate like the one we are in today, Bang will resonate both in the public discourse and in our affects.”—Gulf Coast
“Peña’s character development makes them as believable as your next-door neighbor.”—Corpus Christi Caller-Times
“All the more impressive when considering that [this] is author Daniel Pena’s debut novel, what the reader is given is an inherently fascinating and vividly portrayed story revealing the impact of international drug smuggling on the innocent…Exceptionally well written from first page to last, Bang is unreservedly recommended.”—Midwest Book Review
“Drug trafficking is real and it is heartless. I imagine Bang capable of igniting that same realization in the hearts of others who might have decided it acceptable to ignore. Despite the brutality and bleak inescapability, [it] is an honest and sympathetic novel concerning a family that has been torn apart.”—Hunger Mountain
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, NBC News, and Arcturus among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in beautiful Houston, Texas.
