A Purpose to Our Savagery

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.


About the Author
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.