A Purpose to Our Savagery

Overview

A mother struggles with what it means to be Chicana as she searches for her son at a powwow. A delivery driver has a fateful encounter with a voracious customer at the end of the world. A grieving father learns the true identity of the hummingbird that hovers outside his kitchen window. A Mexican cowboy—who might or might not be the Messiah—orders a pepperoni pizza on a Friday night. And a troubled young man develops an unexpected bond with his neighbor’s racist yard ornament. In his debut collection, Tomás Hulick Baiza explores the poetic and mythic spaces between light and dark, where Aztec gods and more contemporary obsessions fight for dominance. With characters who jump off the page, A Purpose to Our Savagery takes readers on a journey through tragi-comic, hallucinatory, and even nightmarish landscapes where he exalts the resilience of outsiders in a world inclined to leave them behind. In the end, Baiza’s stories highlight the extraordinary and mundane challenges that we overcome to make it to the next day.

Reviews

“Brilliant” —Kirkus
 

“Tomás Hulick Baiza’s engaging debut dares us to ask what kind of person we really want to be. As Dani navigates the traumas of his past and struggles with love in 1990s California, we’re reminded that life is totally messy, but also poetic, and it’s hard but necessary work to forgive our regrets and move forward.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming 

 

"Delivery is a wonderfully quirky and impressively self-assured debut! Baiza gives the reader everything they could ever ask for: humor, pathos, characters that walk off the page, and a compulsively readable voice!” —Jonathan Evison, author of Lawn Boy and Small World 

 

“Sometimes funny, other times heartbreaking, Baiza’s Delivery packs a deep emotional punch as Dani Corriente tries to make sense of his mixed heritage, his past, and his uncertain future.” —Phillippe Diederich, author of Diamond Park

 

“I feel like I lived another life through the pages of this book. Baiza’s warm, funny and often-tense writing walks readers in his pizza-delivering protagonist’s shoes, keeping us guessing where he’s heading in life and who he’ll become.” —Thomas Kohnstamm, author of Lake City

Author Biography

Tomas Baiza is originally from San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies and has appeared in various print and online anthologies and journals. When he is not writing, Tomas is running trails, obsessing over bonsai trees, and playing guitar way too loud.