Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Flowers
    The Flowers
    The Flowers
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Flowers

    Written by Dagoberto Gilb

    Narrated by Ramon de Ocampo

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Dagoberto Gilb has won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sonny Bravo is a young Mexican American struggling to become a man while living with his mom and step-father in a small urban community known as the Flowers. There the assorted residents teach Sonny life lessons, even as racial tensions simmer in the city around them. "Hilarious and thought provoking ..."-Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 19, 2008
    ISBN9781436146043
    The Flowers
    Author

    Dagoberto Gilb

    Dagoberto Gilb is the author of eleven books, including The Magic of Blood, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, The Flowers, and, most recently, Before the End, After the Beginning. Among his honors are the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers Award. His work has been a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle and PEN/Faulkner Awards and has been honored several times in Texas as a proud part of its literary tradition. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Best American Essays, O’Henry Prize Stories, and many other venues, with much of it widely reprinted in textbooks. He is the founding editor of Huizache, a groundbreaking literary journal that features contemporary Chicanx writing. Born and raised in Los Angeles to an American father and a Mexican mother, he now lives in Austin and Mexico City.

    Related to The Flowers

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      A Rare and Beautiful Creature: On the Life and Work of Frank Stanford

      Sep 22, 2017

      It seems fair to suggest that the anxiety of influence—a creative necessity for so many poets—may have failed to penetrate the mobile-homed hamlets where Stanford roamed, rambled, mused, and wrote with prolific intensity. The post A Rare and Beautifu

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Apply Aesthetic Pressure to the Language: An Interview with Paul Harding

      Jun 18, 2018

      This interview first appeared in Chinese at the Shanghai Review of Books on June 3, 2018. I spent my first Iowan winter day at home reading Tinkers, the 2010 Pulitzer Fiction Prize winner. Outside, snow began to fall. I poured myself a cup of hot tea

      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Former Agent Says, 'Border Patrol Does Good Work ... But There's Tension There'

      Feb 6, 2018

      In The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú looks back on his time as a Border Patrol agent. He says, in his experience, "No matter what obstacle we put at the border, it's going to be subverted."

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Winslow, Kois, Tóibín, and More

      Jan 17, 2023

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new release titles from De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Dan Kois, Colm Tóibín, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to he

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Haibun

      Sep 1, 2023

      I wrote a play, out cold in urgent care. Heated blankets toweling my sweated hair. When staged, the actress playing Mother held a wicker broom for acts two and three, with which she beat and beat the rug—a heavy tapestry rolled across the deck. It ju

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Pancake

      Sep 1, 2022

      Pancake
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      TEN POEMS Translations of Rafael Alberti

      May 1, 2024

      Throughout the centuries,through the nothingness of the world,I, without sleep, search for you. Behind me, imperceptible,without touching my shoulders,my dead angel keeps watch. Where is Paradise,Shadow, you who have been there?I ask silently. Cities

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Blue-collar Bard

      Jul 13, 2020

      The Blue-collar Bard
      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How It Felt

      Sep 1, 2022

      How It Felt
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Maxim Osipov

      Mar 9, 2021

      Vnukovo is the smallest, most intimate of Moscow’s airports, and when your flight arrives—especially if it arrives on Saturday at eleven at night—you don’t expect to see much of a crowd. Stamps in the passport, baggage claim—quick and easy. “Where ar

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Travels With Cleo

      Jan 27, 2022

      Travels With Cleo
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Archaeological Inquest

      Sep 1, 2022

      An Archaeological Inquest
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Vision Man

      May 17, 2021

      Vision Man
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Linguist Responds to Cormac McCarthy

      May 25, 2017

      In his recent Nautilus essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” Cormac McCarthy suggests that our unconscious mental processes are a modern echo of the prelinguistic minds of our prehistoric ancestors. He sees a stark contrast between language as a fairly recent

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekulé Problem

      Nov 30, 2017

      Robert Musil, in his Man Without Qualities, wrote that a Soul is “That which crawls away and hides whenever someone mentions algebra.” According to his friend, Elias Canetti, Musil “felt at home and seemed natural among scientists,” as distinct from

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      From Murderpan to Mattapan

      Dec 1, 2021

      From Murderpan to Mattapan
      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 3, 2019

      You are old when your longtime friend Melvin, turned seventy-five, writes you in rage about becoming old. … Melvin knows nothing about old age: Melvin can walk upstairs! Melvin flies to the West Indies with his girlfriend and his wife! In your eighti

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Mournful Spring

      Mar 1, 2022

      in memory of Adam Zagajewski So many friends have you seen pass,maestro of the poetic eulogy. Now it’s my turn. Can you hear me?We don’t know. Why didn’t we spend more time together,talk more, call each other? I thought you’d live to be old,very ol

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Bless Your Soup

      Jan 1, 2022

      I am doing the work of healing.As in:I cry to early-2000s Paula DeAnda.I wash the towels from our apartment.I find your resume onlineand critique it harshly for a ghost audience. I come up with new names for emotions, likeDISLODGED FITTED SHEET orDAM

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Yohanca Delgado

      Mar 9, 2021

      The widow arrived at LaGuardia on a Sunday, but the rumors about the woman who had rented a big apartment, sight unseen, had taken an earlier flight. We had already reviewed, on many occasions and in hushed tones, in the quiet that comes after long h

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Can Baseball Keep Up With Us?

      Jun 22, 2023

      Can Baseball Keep Up With Us?
      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Best Friend Ballad

      Dec 1, 2021

      Sometimes I’ll suddenly remember the powerof her house, and of the approach to it,down the narrow, extreme-curve-to-the-right street, opening onto the somehow delicate cul-de-sac, mybest friend’shouse—what?Italianate? Ogive windows, balconies, tile

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      TheTime Is Now

      Feb 15, 2023

      Suggested Reading: Letters to a Writer of Color (Random House, March 2023) edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro Encouraging readers to reevaluate the codes and conventions that shape assumptions about how fiction should be written, and for who

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz

      Dec 9, 2017

      I’m currently reading Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s essay collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, which was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest. I’ve been an admirer of Sloan’s essays since her first collection, The Fluenc

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Flowers

    4/5

    15 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The Flowers, by Dagoberto Gilb, is a coming of age story about 15 year old Sonny Bravo, a Mexican American boy living with his mother and new step father.This is a very well written story that deals with the issues of being first and second generation American of Latino descent and feeling not quite one thing, not quite the other, not sure which you even want to be, yet life goes on.If you, like me, enjoy the magical realism of many Latino books, there isn't any here. I didn't take stars off because of what this book isn't, but I did wish he'd used some of it, because I did want something magical to happen for Sonny.The writing is well done, and the use of both Spanish and English in the dialogue helps flesh out the characters and story. Don't let the sprinkling of Spanish words scare you, the context clues explain them very well. The device just keeps the themes in the forfront of the story.The book isn't action packed, which makes the end seem to come up out of no where, and I personally left it thinking "what on earth is he going to do now?" Most of the characters are very well drawn and rounded, especially the Latino characters, but the Anglos come across more stereotypical an unlikeable, always wanting something from the Latinos in the story and not quite treating them like human beings.Again, this is very well written, and I enjoyed it. Some of the scenes (there are no chapter breaks, only scene breaks) are beautifully written, to the extent I may add one or more to my American Dreams unit with my students. The book did have some draw backs, manly in the characterization of the Anglos, and the ending that felt really unresolved. Otherwise a good book.
    • 5/5
      Gilb is genius at taking the smallest of moments and looking at them in breathtaking, authentic, surprising ways. This book is no exception. His tender, sensitive, witty protagonist transcends the ordinary over and over, even when he thinks about music and noise and sees the corresponding light and color. Gorgeous writing throughout.