Christ Versus Arizona

Christ versus Arizona turns on the events in 1881 that surrounded the shootout at the OK Corral, where Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Virgil and Morgan Earp fought the Clantons and the McLaurys. Set against a backdrop of an Arizona influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the westward expansion of the United States, the story is a bravura performance by the 1989 Nobel Prize-winning author. A monologue by the na‹ve, unreliable, and uneducated Wendell L. Espana, the book weaves together hundreds of characters and a torrent of interconnected anecdotes, some true, some fabricated. Wendell's story is a document of the vast array of ills that welcomed the dawning of the twentieth century, ills that continue to shape our world in the new millennium.

"Cela prefers the weird, the apparently meaningless and the amorphous. The world of his novels has been likened to that of Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel; he sees man as a prisoner in a forbidding universe where chaos and imperfection always defeat the idealist." -Paul West

"Cela is a restless spirit. In him is united a marked fondness for experiment with a provocative attitude. At the same time he can be included in an old Spanish tradition of hilarious grotesqueness-which is often the other side of despair. Compassion for man's hopeless suffering is there, but tightly controlled." -1989 Nobel prize for Literature Press Release

"One of the most gifted and powerful writers in contemporary Europe." -Commonweal