PRAISE FOR DROWNING TUCSON:
From THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE:
[Drowning Tucson] presents characters with depth and awareness who refuse to be defined by their circumstances, even when they cannot escape them. Morales, in a style reminiscent of Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn), vividly details a community's beauty and brutality.
From FRANK BILL'S HOUSE OF GRIT:
[Drowning Tucson] will break your heart and bust the cartilage in your nose. [It's] masculine fiction...bad ass. If you’ve read Bukowski or Selby, prepare for the next generation. He’s the real deal. Buy the damn thing. Man up.
From LOS ANGELES REVIEW:
Drowning Tucson is indeed a breathless book, one that requires you now and then to surface before going back in. It's worth all your efforts. It's a book that won't soon leave you.
From NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW:
A tough read. Not because it isn’t well-written--Aaron Michael Morales can write like an artful dervish. Not because it isn’t interesting, because Drowning Tucson is exceedingly interesting (and not because of the brouhaha concerning Arizona’s anti-illegal immigrant laws). It’s tough because I wanted to read it fast since it’s so gripping and yet I had to turn away over and over because it is often so distressing...Morales portrays Hispanic American people with dreams and hopes continually destroyed by poverty, machismo, social inequity, and their own thwarted desires. The image of drowning, of Tucson inundated, appears again and again, as a cleansing yet destructive force. Lose-lose. Read this to learn about endemic American injustice.
From BOOKSLUT:
Debut novelist Aaron Michael Morales proves to be a visionary young writer. [Drowning Tucson] is desperate, full of misery of the degree you might expect reading turn-of-the-century Russian literature. Drowning Tucson is more than merely notable. It’s a beautiful fever dream deftly actualized.
From TUCSON WEEKLY:
The meek don’t inherit the Earth in Aaron Michael Morales’ unsettling debut novel, Drowning Tucson. They’d be lucky just to cling to it until it’s shoveled over their faces. Morales fully realizes his central characters and creates unforgettable—if at times unbearable—scenes. Morales’ vision shakes up the comfortable. The novel is impressive; his writing is powerful; his message is layered.
From BROKEN PENCIL:
A series of interlinked character studies all set in an inner-city Tucson rife with lurid violence, desperate sexuality and poverty-infused hopelessness: This is a lush phantasmagoria as readable as it is disturbing...This hauntingly entertaining book breaks bad in a very, very good way.
From THE COLLAGIST:
This book hurt. Drowning Tucson is up to something simultaneously guttural and technical, resonant and crafted. Though the book goes to numerous, really quite unpleasant places, Morales keeps it tight through straightforward, clear, and concise prose. This helps us realize the depths of the badness of this place—this book’s world, this vision of the world in which we live—where the worst does happen, where the idea of escape is the rambling daydream of a deluded fool.
From FRONT PORCH JOURNAL:
In the streets of Tucson, Arizona, qualities such as respect, loyalty, and family are the glue that holds this dysfunctional and violent world together. Morales integrates these aspects clearly and simply with straightforward prose. He is a patient observer, offering his readers the life-details of characters most people wouldn’t consider worth noting. The characters know their lot in life, and unlike most protagonists who try to escape or rise above their plight, the characters in Drowning Tucson struggle to accept their destiny. Drowning Tucson is a continuous answer to the question, “What does it truly mean to be human?” Drowning Tucson [is] a difficult but rewarding read. Morales forces us to sympathize with his characters and to look at our own lives and revalue them.
You will not forget Drowning Tucson. The characters will haunt you, and even after you know the stories are getting to you, you won't be able to stop reading this book.
-LESLIE MARMON SILKO
Aaron Michael Morales doesn't do safe and he doesn't do easy and he doesn't do pretty. What Morales does is make you stare at life right in its cruel and ugly face. He unmasks the lie that we are free, the lie that says we can be anything we want to be. He confronts us with characters that are caught in cruelties that will keep them chained forever. This novel will not make you feel good. It will make you want to avert your eyes in the same way Richard Wright made you want to avert your eyes in Native Son. I am in awe of the muscular writing here, writing that is brave, honest, precise, and disciplined. And I am in awe, too, of Morales's tragic vision that refuses to cave in to a false and easy transcendence. This novel is at once sincere and ironic - not something more seasoned writers could pull off. Drowning Tucson took my breath away.
Savage Chicano writing...Morales wrestles with nothing less than the parameters of the human soul. This is subversive and sly work, as knowing in its effect as it is exciting to read. For all its thrilling nature, and for all his hard-edge style, this is a deeply moral effort.
-LUIS ALBERTO URREA
Snapshots of life on the lower rungs in the Arizona desert...Morales affects a plainspoken, colloquial style that captures the rough-and-tumble attitudes of the people who live there.
-KIRKUS REVIEWS
From BOOKLIST:
In this vividly rendered novel-in-stories, Morales depicts desperate people trapped by poverty and circumstance. Explosive violence is always a possibility, and Morales writes such visceral descriptions of gang beat-downs that some chapters are difficult to read. Heartbreaking [and] frightening. These are brutal and frequently riveting stories of the mean streets rendered in highly emotional, cinematic language.
[read full review]
From HIGH COUNTRY NEWS:
Morales writes about the southern Arizona city and its surrounding landscape with such precision that it’s sometimes hard to remember that Drowning Tucson is a work of fiction. This is not an easy book to read: Morales tears his characters apart and puts their seething grief on display, and sometimes it’s a grief too heavy to bear. Morales drowns his readers as well as the city, but the sensation feels less like a loss of consciousness than a sudden awakening. Only after finishing the last sentence is it possible to exhale.
[read full review]
From JANUARY MAGAZINE:
Morales’s vision is disturbing, haunting though sometimes even strangely hopeful. If there also occasionally appears to be an unevenness in the telling, I’m not convinced this is not part of Morales’ art which, like his talent, is considerable.Two things seem certain: you won’t ever look at Tucson in quite the same way again. And you won’t rest easily until the last page is turned.
[read full review]
From CHICAGO BOOKS EXAMINER:
Morales is able to engage your empathy, you care about the people you might otherwise chose to ignore. Morales’s cinematic style, with pacing akin to Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, is as merciless as his plotting—in a good way.
[read full review]
From DENVER BOOKS EXAMINER:
Aaron Michael Morales’s debut novel, about a side of humanity long feared and ignored by the status quo, [is] especially timely.
[read full review]
PRAISE FOR FROM HERE YOU CAN ALMOST SEE THE END OF THE DESERT:
From Word Riot:
This collection wrestles with the state of humanity, specifically the impact of masculinity--how it oppresses, harms, and even kills--and the way in which men, women, and children manage, or don't manage, to cope with its potentially odious nature. Morales's focus on male brutality suggests a hyper-real presentation of his fictional Tucson.
[read full review]