Mexico is only eight miles from Bravo University. When Minerva Mondragón, candidate for a tenure-track Border Studies position, suggests Professor Quigley take her across the border for lunch before the interview, he acquiesces uneasily. He can’t afford to scare her off, so doesn’t mention he hasn’t crossed over in more than a year because of the drug cartel-related violence. The first two candidates have turned down the job offer, and the committee can’t lose this applicant.
But lunch in the fictional border town of La Reina leads to shocking consequences for the candidate and her hapless guide. Minerva never returns from the restaurant’s bathroom and Quigley, feeling guilty, convinces himself that she has decided to disappear. He returns to the United States without reporting her missing or mentioning the trip to his colleagues. Meanwhile, the applicant finds herself bound and gagged in the back of a taxi, victim of a kidnapping.
A host of quirky characters populate these pages. There’s the bumbling university professor trying to cover his ass and the kidnapped woman attempting to escape a dire situation alive. The candidate’s dissertation director knows just enough about Bravo University’s government-sponsored spy training program to endanger Minerva’s life. And the new leader of the Gamboa organization is the son who has been educated to take over the financial side of the business but has no idea how to handle the intra-gang war that erupted following his father’s imprisonment in the United States. A long-time professor of literature and creative writing in South Texas, José Skinner writes darkly comedic scenes with an insider’s understanding of university and border life and the narco violence that has disrupted them.
“What makes the book especially powerful is its mix of tones as Skinner skillfully blends dark humor with dread; the absurdities of academic life—tenure-track interviews, awkward faculty interactions, petty departmental politics—stand in stark contrast to the danger unfolding in Mexico… This is a novel that lingers after its final page.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The book’s 101-level course in Cartel Studies alone is worth the price of admission, but The Search Committee’s subtlest charms lie in Skinner’s ongoing critique of literary writing in English about Mexico and the border… The author’s light-as-a-feather comedy is powerful enough to make us reconsider what ‘the real thing’ is, when it comes to English-language literature about narcos and the border, and to convince us that he might know better than his more famous peers how to get it right.”—The Texas Observer
Praise for the work of José Skinner:
“Skinner’s stories are smart and colloquial, conflicted and comical… He doesn’t pull punches.”—Austin American-Statesman on The Tombstone Race
“With verisimilitude, compassion, and a surprising amount of nobility, Skinner navigates the mean streets of New Mexico with cunning and grace.”—Kirkus Reviews on The Tombstone Race
“New Mexico is fertile literary soil for José Skinner’s second story collection. The fourteen stories explore society through the lens of ethnicity, class, friendship, family conflict and generational friction. Believable, quirky characters, young and old, inhabit the stories.”—Albuquerque Journal on The Tombstone Race
“Skinner allows his characters to speak in a language that is evocative, unsentimental and empirical.”—Pasatiempo on The Tombstone Race
“José Skinner’s Flight and Other Stories is a varied, well-crafted and frequently daring collection of vignettes centering mostly around the complex interplay between whites and Latinos in the American Southwest. The characters are complex and fully realized, and Skinner’s voice is confident yet nuanced throughout.”—Publishers Weekly on Flight and Other Stories
“The lonely voices in these stories—the best of which try for a neat resolution and then reveal its fragility—are all immediate, their talk laced with Spanish insult and endearment, comic, angry, anguished. He is a writer to watch.”—Booklist on Flight and Other Stories
JOSÉ SKINNER is the author of two short story collections, The Tombstone Race (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) and Flight and Other Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2001). His fiction and translations have appeared in Quarterly West, Colorado Review, Other Voices, Bilingual Review, Puerto del Sol and many other literary journals. His nonfiction appears in anthologies such as Speaking desde las heridas: Transborder Testimonies (UNAM) and Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence (Arte Público). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, he was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas-Pan American and director of its bilingual MFA in Creative Writing. He now lives in Austin, Texas, where he and his wife run the bookstore Alienated Majesty.
