Woodcuts of Women: Stories

Rating:
Summary: AZ Reader
Review: Author Gilb brings to the reading public a marvelous work of short stories depicting life in his culture with an indepth knowledge of human behavior. He peers deep into emotion, love, and the commonality of ordinary life with wisdom and honesty and displays his keen artistic ability touching the pulse of human mankind. He equates his vast abilities using bits and pieces and brushes for all of us via the pen, stories that touch life's precious moments. This evening Author Gilb I was privileged to view your interview on national television. May I offer my congratulations to you as a fellow American, on your outstanding contribution to the literary world. You build your stories with great ability. Wish you much success and I'm looking forward to your novel, which I believe you indicated is under construction.

Rating:
Summary: A Sexy Volume
Review: Dagoberto Gilb is too sexy and handsome and the book's drawings are very sexy as well. I bought the book several months ago and when I got home I didn't read it. I thoght I bought it as an impulse buy, because wanted to have him sign it to me at a lecture he gave. Now that I read it I'm only disappointed that there aren't more stories and it all had to end. I have been reading Latinas almost exclusively before, and as much as I love my comadres, this one is by far my favorite (joking, he says he is a Chicana writer) and I, like Columbus, feel like I've discovered a new writer.

Rating:
Summary: Gilb Cuts Deeply into Love of Women
Review: Dagoberto Gilb's "Woodcuts of Women" is one of the most honest, entertaining, well-crafted short story collections about love and lust that I've read in a long while. Gilb doesn't spare us when he allows his male characters to delve deeply into their obsessions with the opposite sex. In "Maria de Covina," the first story in the collection, a young Chicano (nineteen but he thinks he passes for twenty) simply tells us: "This is the thing: I like women. No, wait. I love women." In "The Pillows," the male protagonist, Jorge, thinks he figured out why his pocho friend, Danny, is having women problems: the only pillows he owns are old, raggedy and dirty. Jorge is obsessed about this particularly while housesitting for Danny. Jorge tells his own girlfriend: "I can't imagine a woman getting in a bed with those pillows. I can't imagine a woman wanting to, even to take a nap." Some of the stories are heartbreaking, like "Shout," where poverty pushes a man to be abusive to his wife and children; even here, there is a glimmer of hope, hope based on love of women. Gilb is a master at ambiguities, our ambiguities as people searching for companionship. The only bad thing about this book is that it is too short (a mere 167 pages).

Much praise is also due to the artist, Artemio Rodriguez, who illustrated each story with linocuts (similar to woodcuts); these illustrations capture the wonder, danger and craziness of loving women too much.

Rating:
Summary: Gilb Cuts Deeply into Love of Women
Review: Dagoberto Gilb's "Woodcuts of Women" is one of the most honest, entertaining, well-crafted short story collections about love and lust that I've read in a long while. Gilb doesn't spare us when he allows his male characters to delve deeply into their obsessions with the opposite sex. In "Maria de Covina," the first story in the collection, a young Chicano (nineteen but he thinks he passes for twenty) simply tells us: "This is the thing: I like women. No, wait. I love women." In "The Pillows," the male protagonist, Jorge, thinks he figured out why his pocho friend, Danny, is having women problems: the only pillows he owns are old, raggedy and dirty. Jorge is obsessed about this particularly while housesitting for Danny. Jorge tells his own girlfriend: "I can't imagine a woman getting in a bed with those pillows. I can't imagine a woman wanting to, even to take a nap." Some of the stories are heartbreaking, like "Shout," where poverty pushes a man to be abusive to his wife and children; even here, there is a glimmer of hope, hope based on love of women. Gilb is a master at ambiguities, our ambiguities as people searching for companionship. The only bad thing about this book is that it is too short (a mere 167 pages).

Much praise is also due to the artist, Artemio Rodriguez, who illustrated each story with linocuts (similar to woodcuts); these illustrations capture the wonder, danger and craziness of loving women too much.

Rating:
Summary: cutting to the chase--thank goodness
Review: Forget the stuffy, turgid M.F.A. writing that goes for literature these days. Here is the real thing. Stories that will hold your attention as well as the gaze of a beautiful soulfull-eyed woman or the anticipatory wonderment of a guy in love. Just get down and read this stuff and celebrate some real honest to goodness feel good to be alive literature--a sure cure for the fashionable post modern, cyberpunk crap hip-manque half brain dead college professors are pushing off on their students.

Rating:
Summary: a new fan
Review: i am a new fan of this author. i just finished the stories in woodcuts of women and loved them even more than the ones in magic of blood. the person (a guy and probably not a latino) who wrote the review below is right about how good this book is but he is not about sandra cisneros or julia alvarez who we all have loved very much too, just like i do this new book of dagoberto gilb.

Rating:
Summary: Don't miss it.
Review: I've become bored with much of our contemporary fiction in the past few years. When I picked up Woodcuts of Women, I took it for a light read about sexual prowess and conquests by clichéd Latin-lovers. Neither did I particularly like the writers who had blurbed this author - Cisneros, Alvarez - and Proulx is too much research for my tastes. However, since I did love Jayne Anne Philips's Black Tickets, I pushed forward on the basis of her rave.

I had to make sure, but once I read all these wonderful stories a second time I thought I should speak up and say that I found this was one of the best books I've read in many years. What marked it for me was not only the originality of the stories (read "About Tere in Palomas", "Brisa", or "Mayala One Day in 1989"), smart ("A Painting in Santa Fe", "The Pillows"), out loud funny ("Maria De Covina", "Hueco", "Bottoms"), and dramatic ("Shout", "Snow"), but they have......let me call it "huge guts" instead of what I could say. Here's an author, who seems very much a man, who is writing about women, and he's doing so honestly and energetically. Here are stories intellectually charged and entertaining, both.

If any awards are left (that the Jonathan Franzen didn't already win), I nominate this book. I hope people don't miss it like I almost did. Kudos to the author!

Rating:
Summary: MORE THAN 5 STARS
Review: if I could give woodcuts of women more stars i would...it is so good...it is the best book i read this summer...i have been hearing about it for a couple of months now and so i decided i would have to read it and i did. yes it is about love and sex but it is about alot more too. and if you watch how beautiful is the writing not to mention the deeper thouhgts that it creates...a profound book by a writer who understands and loves woman and not just sex altough i think he obviosuly does...i recommend this book especially to women. because we do not always think of men as this aware of us. i read a review that said gilb made them to idealized in woodcuts if that is so i want to be idealized then. go buy this book, the art fits to it too.

Rating:
Summary: MORE THAN 5 STARS
Review: Some books can slap you awake.. Gilb's "Woodcuts of Women" is like that. It was like I'd been asleep and it woke me up and I had energy again. There is not a story in this collection that can't be read more than once. the best book I've read in years. I am not a person who usually like short story collections, they are usually like "assignments" in creative writing classes that please teachers. I read novels. But this collecton isn't like a collection of stories. It's arranged around maybe not one "theme", though all of them are about love and sex and sex and love, and all that confusion about love. It's better and deeper than that. It is chicano, but its not just a chicano book. Not about it only. Like "100 Years of Solitude" is about Columbia but not about Columbia only. No, the whole of it takes your breath away. Sure its the fine writing Gilb has-poetic writing and scenes that, common as they might seem to be, make you feel like you've seen it for the first time. Chicano Zen?.

I got on amazon.com to write this, never written one before. I don't usualy rave about books.

The stories have a wide scope, even if on the other hand they are all so much the same. The last one titled "Snow" was maybe the finest. About a man going to New York because his girlfriend is pregnant. There's a scene (imagined) in an abortion clinic that is the saddest. And the end. The snow and the silence on Broadway Ave in NYC. That is the end of the whole book, the mood. Silence. Everything changed.

I think anyone would love the story "Bottoms." It was wild funny. About this gigantic woman, she keeps getting bigger and bigger, a fantasy and not, who decides to have this journalist who is all messed up about someone else. There's a story about "Tere" who he fantasizes about while he's staying with another woman, while some other woman he's staying with wants him to fall in love with her. This book isn't about only men or only women, we all act and feel this, all of us are confused and conflicted about love. Battling one dream that we lost while getting another that we can't pay attention to. I could go on more and about every story.

I mentioned Marquez. I read Gilb's novel before. It's not Marquez like in the slightest, it is more European, or Steinbeck, but it has the depth of an major book. And I'd only read a few of his stories in "The Magic of Blood". (I plan to get that and really sit down with it because it's suppose to be great). But his "Woodcuts of Women", I wll say, is an American Marquez. Beautiful and profound. Someone says it is short It might not be that many pages but evey single page counts, and you read every sentence. Not like so many books. It is just right, no padding. I guarantee you will love this book as much as I do

Anthony Park Chicago, Illinois

Rating:
Summary: Silvia's Review
Review: WOODCUTS OF WOMAN took me a long time to have time to read it (ok ok) but it is sooooo good!!! Really I didnt know books like this could be printed unless it was like for penthouse (joking, its not like penthouse tho the book is a lot about sex). I read the stories in bed and thought of him!! He came to UCSB and we saw him and all my girls were oohmygod. No really this is a great book to read and I recommend it to everybody. The best and funnest story is the one Hueco and the one Bottoms about the amazon woman was my second favorite. There is this one about El Paso called Mayela One Day in 1989 that is so good I read it again right after I read it the first time. I agree that it is like reading a novel. I know the book it is a collection of stories but for me each story was more like chapter. For me I don't always like to read but I couldnt wait to read it at night. Its my favorite book now by a Chicano writer. So much of what people read by Latinos is only about our identity and only being different and some times that is boring. Its about time!! Maybe it is suppose to be about women but the author writes about being a male and not just a Latino. I felt like he was being honest. I am proud that I own the book and I would tell everybody to buy it.