“An impressive literary debut. . . . The author dazzles with his ability to develop flawed, oddball characters, his penchant for weaving in weather and the landscape as supporting characters, and his smart handling of metaphors.”—Albuquerque Journal
“Stark and stunning.”—Pasatiempo
“The stories in Kingdom of the Sun are set in Deming, a bleak way station between Silver City and Las Cruces through which author James Terry weaves a dense tapestry of class stratification, sexual confusion, and football culture.”—Jennifer Levin, Santa Fe New Mexican
“Terry is a literary artist of the best sort: keen to render the world whole and crosswise, smart about what counts for the crooked kind we are, unafraid of the ambiguous and evanescent, brave enough to get out of the way of those who’ve galvanized his imagination, eager to do all the work relative to the ‘willed word,’ and generous enough to give us the whole story. He takes no shortcuts. And he rouses our rooting interest in those for whom, their ages aside, the end is always nigh.”—Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories
“In the tradition of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, James Terry’s Kingdom of the Sun uses the town of Deming, New Mexico, to reveal how human character is shaped by the place in which we are raised. Kingdom of the Sun offers an honest, authentic, and poignantly revealing vision of how we become who we are.”—Steve Heller, author of What We Choose to Remember
