Blood Calls to Blood

Here in America, we know that the drug war is tearing Mexico apart, but it feels distant, removed from our day-to-day lives. What is it really like to live on the front lines? Featuring original work from award-winning Mexican writers, "Blood Calls to Blood" presents a gripping yet intimate account of a crisis that has brutally claimed at least 50,000 people since December 2006. With stunning first-person testimony and insightful commentary, this book collects writing from ZYZZYVAthe acclaimed San Francisco literary journal dedicated since 1985 to publishing the best work from West Coast writers, poets, translators, and artists. Among the nonfiction and fiction in this volume, you will find reportage from Diego Enrique Osorno, who tries to puzzle together what exactly happened when the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel clashed in the border town of Ciudad Mier, and from Marcela Turati, who visits a morgue in northeastern Mexico and talks to the desperate people who have long been searching for their missing loved ones.There are short stories from the late, internationally lauded fiction writer Daniel Sada (about three heads discovered in an ice chest during a drug cartel's party) and from emerging writer Mauro Gallardo (on a night of joyriding with a young narco). An introductory essay by John Gibler, author of "To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War," provides a primer on what's truly at stake in Mexico's drug war, and a lyrical meditation from novelist and columnist Cristina Rivera Garza explores the reasons for continuing to write amid the mayhem. "Blood Calls to Blood" is an important record of a catastrophe that continues to unfold and greatly affects not just all of Mexico, but all of the Americas.