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In Ray Gonzalez's breakthrough book, flash fictions weave together centuries of conflict between Mexican and American culture. Quick glimpses into the mysterious and surreal emerge as modern society, isolated individuals, and even animals confront their damaged experiences.

Review: "Corky Mendoza returns from the dead to haunt the boys who shot him; Roberto interprets a gray hair from his comb as a sign from God; and a devil dressed in leather pants and a Tupac Shakur t-shirt tells Joey to kill his wife-beating father.
Anything can and does happen in Circling the Tortilla Dragon as Ray Gonzalez chronicles the disintegration of new myths while creating new myths, which are often just as frightening and funny as the old ones. It's a dazzling magical realist landscape where autobiography, history, dream and myth merge, Gonzalez being the only writer I know with the boldness and imagination to invent it all."
-Peter Johnson, author of Miracles and Mortifications

"The writing is lucid, the imagination luminous and the soul - trickster fast as brujo's mercury."
-Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler

Bio: RAY GONZALEZ is a poet, essayist, and editor born in El Paso, Texas. The author of seven books of poetry and the editor of twelve anthologies, Gonzalez has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for twenty-two years. He formed LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is an Associate Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota.

The author of Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999) and Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, Ray Gonzalez has also won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Awards for The Heat Arrivals. His poetry has appeared in the 1999 and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000. Among his awards are a 2000 Loft Literary Center Career Initiative Fellowship, a 1998 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, and a 1993 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.