Tucson Strip Clubs: Drowning Tucson by Aaron Michael Morales
Drowning Tucson is a series of vignettes, short stories, that serve to parse the life of its protagonist: the city of Tucson. Place is significant. It helps define an individual; we move to places that in some way highlight our virtues or vices — and this is often taken for granted in novels. New York becomes a default location that doesnt always carry much bearing on the story outside of that it is supposed to let the reader know that anything is possible. Morales takes location to a very specific ends, using it not to define his characters, but to reveal how characters define place. There are layers of meaning forcibly asserted on locations by the ways we interact with them, and Morales makes that painfully clear.
The strip clubs on Tucson’s Miracle Mile are simultaneously the envy of naïve high school boys, home of a frightening sexual awakening for another student on the run from a gang, the source of shame for an …
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