Set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the stories in On a NASA Flight to Heaven explore the various ways in which the border fractures traditional narratives. Standing between North American and Latin American literary traditions, these stories are highly speculative in their approach. In “The Gospel According to Gabriel,” a man and the incarnation of his God together confront their own limitations on the streets of Tijuana. A fake historical document about a nonexistent, nineteenth-century religious text centers “Gertrudis Guzmán’s The Great, Great Book of the Republic of Beautiful Deserts.” And in “On a NASA Flight to Heaven,” the daughter of a cartel boss escapes her fate on the back of what might or might not be a hallucinated fantasy. By consistently blurring together the genres of fiction and nonfiction, and by furthermore resisting all gestures towards completeness and finality, this collection of stories offers a completely novel interpretation of the borderlands.
