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Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
Barefoot Dogs
Wednesday, March 11
5:00-7:00
“BAREFOOT DOGS [is] a stellar debut collection from the superbly talented Antonio Ruiz-Camacho. These linked stories follow the members of a wealthy Mexican family after their patriarch, José Victoriano Arteaga, is kidnapped. Through the fragmentary, polyphonic nature of a story collection, BAREFOOT DOGS reveals how unspeakable violence shatters a once cohesive family.
Set in Madrid, New York, Austin, and Palo Alto, where the family members have fled, each story in BAREFOOT DOGS is told from a different perspective—Arteaga’s children, grandchildren, mistress, and housekeepers—and describes the family’s unsettled lives as they struggle to find peace and meaning in their new homes. Ruiz-Camacho’s humanizing, heartfelt, and wholly original narrative follows the long ripple of trauma—across continents and generations—to show us what’s below the surface: fathoms of love and loss.
The Arteagas are an engaging and tragic family—once proud and affluent but now profoundly damaged. This collection presents memorable, sympathetic characters who must reckon with their grief and misfortune as their family disintegrates. BAREFOOT DOGS is a brilliant tale of diaspora and an incisive view into the absurdities and insufficiencies of living in a land that will never feel like home.
Ruiz-Camacho is from Toluca, Mexico. He began to write in English as recently as 2008, and there is an electricity in his language that calls to mind Aleksandar Hemon, Ha Jin, and Junot Díaz. A 2009 Journalism Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2014 Dobie Paisano Fellow in Fiction, he earned his MFA from the New Writers Project at UT Austin.”
Praise for Barefoot Dogs:
"Barefoot Dogs is a splendid collection. Each of these stories is a straight-on jab to the soul, the kind of sharp fictional punch that wakes us up to our own flawed, fragile, essential humanity. With this debut collection, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho shows he's already a writer of the first rank, one of those rare storytellers who leaves you wanting more even as he breaks your heart."
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“The brilliantly gifted Ruiz-Camacho, writing in English about the members of a Mexican family forced to flee their country, brings the terror, sadness, tenderness and intimacy as well as the class absurdities of contemporary Mexican life into that most traditional of American forms, the realist short story. Ruiz-Camacho’s mastery will impress and astonish, open your eyes, but most of all, each one of these stories will unforgettably touch your heart and move you."
—Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name and The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle
An unforgettable debut of linked stories that follow the members and retinue of a wealthy Mexican family forced into exile after the patriarch is kidnapped.
On an unremarkable night, José Victoriano Arteaga—the head of a thriving Mexico City family—vanishes on his way home from work.