Summary
Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club gathers seven stories by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, published in 2012 by Cinco Puntos Press and set on both sides of the border between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez. The Kentucky Club of the title is a real bar on Avenida Juárez, a few blocks south of the crossing, and it runs through the book as a backdrop, a meeting place and a refuge. Many of the characters are gay men, many are Mexican American, and the violence of Juárez hangs over several of the stories.
The opening story, "He Has Gone to Be with the Women," follows Juan Carlos, a writer, and Javier, a chauffeur in Juárez, who meet in an El Paso coffeehouse and fall in love. Then Javier disappears, and after a fruitless search Juan Carlos is told by friends that Javier has "gone to be with the women," and gives up looking. In "The Art of Translation," set in 1985, Nick Guerra is recovering in El Paso from a racially motivated assault when he meets a woman named Sylvia and goes with her to the Kentucky Club; he will not let her take off his shirt. "The Rule Maker" belongs to Max, abandoned by his mother and living with his drug dealing father, who survives by keeping rules and straight A's, leaves for Georgetown, and comes home when his father overdoses. In "Sometimes the Rain" two teenage boys in El Paso, Neto, who is Mexican American, and Brian, who is white, find they both have abusive fathers; Neto lends Brian the money to get away, and Brian joins the Army, writes to him from Da Nang, and dies in the war.
These are sad stories about grief, addiction and damage, and they rarely offer much comfort. Gina Lujan Boubion, reviewing the book for The Common, wrote that she read "these mournful stories with rapt attention," and Reginald Harris at Lambda Literary concluded that "Sáenz reveals that his true subject is survival, and trying to live through pain, grief and loss." It suits readers who know Sáenz from his young adult novels and want his fiction for adults, and anyone drawn to writing about the border.
Historical Context & Significance
The collection won the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The judges, Walter Kirn, Nelly Rosario and A.J. Verdelle, considered more than 350 novels and story collections published in 2012, and the finalists were Amelia Gray's Threats, Laird Hunt's Kind One, T. Geronimo Johnson's Hold It 'Til It Hurts and Thomas Mallon's Watergate. The five writers were honored at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington on May 4, 2013. In June the same book won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.
Sáenz was born in 1954 in Old Picacho, New Mexico, and grew up near Las Cruces. He took his master's degree in creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1987, later taught there and chaired the creative writing department, and retired from the university in 2016. He came out as gay at fifty four. His young adult novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012) reached cinemas as a film in 2023. He died on the night of July 28, 2026, at seventy one, and El Paso Matters, reporting his death, wrote that with the PEN/Faulkner he had become "the first Latino and only the second gay writer to earn the honor."
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