Jillian in the Borderlands

The darkly funny tales in Jillian in the Borderlands feature visionary experiences, ghosts, faith healers, a deer’ s head that speaks, a dog who channels spirits of the dead— and a young woman whose drawings begin to create realities instead of just reflecting them. “ Immediately, in the first tale," reviewer Kathryn Ordiway writes, "the reader is plunged into Jillian’ s world, a hallucinatory one of ghosts and eternal knowledge, but also a familiar one, filled with deportations and racial injustice and men girls are told to stay away from. . . There isn’ t a moment in these stories where you don’ t feel the vein connecting Jillian’ s world to our own.” Chosen by The Rumpus for their list of "What to read when you want to celebrate Women's History."

From the Back Cover

In this lush and imaginative exploration of what makes us human, Alvarado conjures the twin energies of spirit and body, finding, in the face of political violence and its foul counterparts, our most urgent reasons for action and hope. While these are called dark tales, I find them genuinely uplifting, as Alvarado's storytelling allows us access to the nexus for joy, in opposition. --Aurelie Sheehan, Once into the NightWith the ecstatic knowledge of an ancient curandera and the playful, storytelling prowess of a child, Alvarado travels great distances, bears witness, presages problems, and intuits solutions. She isn't just at the forefront of white writers writing about race, she's at the forefront of people writing about what it means to be human and how we might survive our own dangerous shortcomings. Masterful and original, her voice has been here since the before-time; in a world that needs healing and vision more than ever, it would behoove us all to listen. -- Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of HappinessRelentlessly musical, heart-twisting, and haunted by the supernatural, Jillian in the Borderlands is a masterpiece of contemporary fabulist fiction. Told in a kaleidoscopic set of shifting points of view, these stories take readers to boundaries both geographic and metaphorical: between sickness and health, wonder and horror, the past and the present. "Women are always searching among the dead and the wounded," observes the collection's titular character. As the lives of constellating characters make clear, however, what women find is so much more complicated. -- Allegra Hyde, Of This New World With stunning buoyancy, these linked stories build a world of hope and magic, while challenging the hardships humans so often create for themselves. Alvarado has crafted a world one wants to sink into, full of empathy, sly humor, beauty and charm, while also looking directly at the question of what it means to be humans roaming the margins together. - - Monica Drake, The Stud Book

About the Author

Beth Alvarado, who has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro-American woman marrying into a Mexican-American family, has spent most of her life in Arizona. Her most recent book, Anxious Attachments, won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein- Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. She's also the author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir and the short story collection Not a Matter of Love, winner of the Many Voices Prize.

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