Author Description

This is one very funny book, a collection of thirty-nine hilarious short stories, many of them about the author’s attempt to be fired from his wife’s shop in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Not exactly a travel book, it is, nonetheless, often instructive and always laugh-out-loud funny. There is no extreme to which Mr. Gevins (always with humor) will not go in his futile and desperate endeavors to get himself sacked. Whether he is insulting customers who ask for discounts, or offering “free gift counseling” to cheap husbands, Mr. Gevins manages to sow confusion, chaos and rage, but never succeeds in getting his patient and forgiving wife to finally lower the boom. The remaining stories delve into the surreal mess which is the author’s daily existence in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico: dealing with a cockroach outbreak of biblical proportions; accidentally taking his religious mother-in-law to a live-sex act; living through four botched burglaries of his home in which he both lost and gained two pairs of tennis shoes; attempting to hire a band, whose regular gig is playing at a rural whorehouse, for his mother-in-law’s seventieth birthday party…and so on. The writing is distinctive, crisp and always funny, as Gevins massages and tweaks the English language in ways hitherto unseen on the printed page. But best of all, he captures the amazingly surreal quality of daily life in the land of mescal and Mariachis.