One Life - David Lida

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      Praise for David Lida’s One Life

      “David Lida’s One Life is full of suspense and beautifully described moments that often conjure Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. Like his courageous protagonist Richard, who often journeys to the most dismal and violent places in rural Mexico in search of an elusive history, Lida fearlessly explores the stark places that often shape the human spirit.”

      — Maria Venegas, author of Bulletproof Vest: the Ballad of an Outlaw and his Daughter

      “Lida, himself a mitigation specialist and writer with deep ties to Mexico (where he lives), pours personal emotion into his story. In the process, he brings an elusive sense of dignity to a world where it is seemingly lost.”

       — Kirkus Reviews

      “David Lida’s daring novel One Life will take you on a journey to darkest Mexico, where daily life is rich with irony and pathos, violence and humor, destitution and the homeliest of comforts. Richard, your travel guide, is on a mythic quest; he must descend to the underworld and come out with a story that will move the stone hearts of a Louisiana jury to mercy. His goal is to save the life of a condemned woman whose name, Esperanza, means hope. One life, his for hers. Gripping, suspenseful, worldly, and wise, this thought-provoking novel never lets up and the serious moral questions it raises resound long after the final page is turned.”

      — Valerie Martin, author of The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

      “As I followed Richard, the unraveling narrator of David Lida’s One Life, I kept seeing, peeking around the corner, the whiskey priest from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. They both minister to a population so forsaken it has lost faith in mercy. For the Mexicans of Lida’s novel, there are only labor and fate, the former measured by dollars, the latter doled out by the country that issues them. Which only makes Lida’s achievement more remarkable: To follow Richard is to relinquish Anglo time, Anglo logic, Anglo law — to say nothing about the assumptions that obtain about here and ‘down there.’”

      — Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life

      Praise for David Lida’s Travel Advisory

      “Forget your romantic notions about south-of-the-border idylls. Writer David Lida gets at the contradictory, elusive reality of Mexico in this disturbing and powerful debut collection...elegantly conceived and executed...a powerful and original writer, one to follow, wherever he takes us next.”

      — New Orleans Times-Picayune

      “David Lida’s powerful, sympathetic, and critical imagination renders Mexico and Mexicans from seemingly every angle — it is like being let in on a secret, one detail at a time.”

      — Luc Sante, author of Low Life and The Factory of Facts

      “Disturbing, provocative and often darkly funny, the stories in Travel Advisory go a long way toward explaining the duality many of us feel toward Mexico.”

      — San Antonio Express News

      “Gritty and unforgiving...paints a convincing, unvarnished picture of a struggling country.”

      — Publishers Weekly

      “Gets under your skin...the power of Lida’s stories lies in their tawdry, unraveling characters and the uncompromising, even disastrous situations in which they find themselves in this land of sorcery, squalor and seduction.”

      — Time Out New York

      “Observant, engrossing, horrifying, warmly humane and cooly yet devastatingly satiric stories. An intimate and convincing fictional portrait of contemporary life in Mexico.”

      — Francisco Goldman, author of The Ordinary Seaman

      “Simultaneously perverse and purifying, Travel Advisory ushers in a talented writer with a mordant eye.”

      — Rita Mae Brown

      “These short stories ... capture Mexico at its essence, in intimate glimpses rather than generalities... an easy, narrative style that flows freely from devastating satire to equally insightful compassion.”

      — Paper

      The Unnamed Press

      P.O. Box 411272

      Los Angeles, CA 90041

      Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Copyright © 2016 by David Lida

      978-1-944700-024-9 (ebook ISBN)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952136

      This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

      Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

      For my dead

      Whosoever destroys the life of a single human being, it is as if he had destroyed an entire world; and whosoever preserves the life of a single human being, it is as if he had preserved an entire world.

      — The Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5)

      Whosoever kills an innocent person, it is as if he has killed all of humanity, and whosoever saves the life of one, it is as if he has saved the life of all humanity.

      — The Qur’an 5:32

      Oh, Mexico, I never really been but I’d sure like to go.

      — James Taylor, “Mexico”

      CONTENTS

       Media naranja

      All this

      The girl

      Independence Day

       Sidebar

       Part Two: Welcome to the Club

      A half orange among lemons

      Sixty-nine motions

      A Sunday kind of love

      Silent scream

      Q&A

      True Blue

      More media naranja

      What a difference a day made

      Free trade

      The road to Mexico

      Investigation

      Welcome to the club

      Bones in the desert

       Exhibit A

       Part Three: I’ll Fly Away

      King

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