Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. We're hoping to read more fiction this summer, so our July selections include novels from faculty in the Department of English and Department of Chicana/o/x Studies as well as graduates of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.

Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces (University of Nevada Press, April 2021) by Maceo Montoya is a satirical novel about a Mexican American artist's struggle to create great works. His plans include a move to Paris to join the ranks of his artistic hero, Gustave Courbet — except it’s 1943 and he’s stuck in the backwoods of New Mexico. Penniless and prone to epileptic fits, even his mother thinks he’s crazy.

You Must Fight Them (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) is a novella by Maceo Montoya. In it, a short, bookish half-Mexican doctoral student returns to his hometown of Woodland, California and tries to reconnect with Lupita Valdez, the girl he worshipped in high school. First he must come to terms with her three hulking brothers and his own identity.