Elizabeth Gonzalez James Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Elizabeth Gonzalez James
Elizabeth Gonzalez James is originally from South Texas, and currently lives with her family in Massachusetts. She teaches fiction writing at Grub Street.

“Mona At Sea” was inspired by her own experience of long term unemployment. It is an experience that she has not seen too much in fiction, and she truly felt that somebody needed to write about what it feels like to be inside of this hopeless and horrible time.

Elizabeth’s favorite part of being a writer is being able to write from bed and not have a commute.

She folds laundry to deal with her writer’s block. If she is stuck on something, she finds that the repetitive action of folding clothes helps her think.

“Mona At Sea” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2021. This darkly funny coming of age story that’s set against the backdrop of the Great Recession which takes the audience on such a wild journey through an uncertain and strange modern America.

Mona Mireles is your quintessential overachiever: valedictorian of her college class and former spelling bee champ, she’s got a sterling resume and this wall of medals and plaques in her bedroom which stretches from floor to ceiling. She is also unemployed, broke, back home living with her parents, and totally adrift in love and life. She is seven months out of college and attempting desperately to reassemble the pieces of her life after that Wall Street job that she had waiting for her post-graduation dissolves in the Great Recession’s wake.

Her reaction to her losing her job goes viral and she’s publicly branded the “Sad Millennial”, she starts this downward spiral into bitterness, self-pity, and late night drunken binges on cat videos. She is the type that says just the right thing at the wrong moments, and sees the world through a cynic’s eyes.

Set in suburban Tucson amid the social and financial malaise of the early 2000s, Mona (age 23) has to not only find a job, but rapidly learn how to navigate the complexities of adult relationships within the black hole of her parents’ shattering marriage. At the urging of her mom, she grudgingly joins this support group for job seekers, and slowly starts seeing that all’s not lost, and that possibly losing the Wall Street job was a blessing in disguise. She may even come to learn what it is that she finds meaningful in life. Question is will she be brave enough to pursue it?

“Mona At Sea” was named Most Anticipated by The Millions, The Rumpus, Frolic, and Betches.

“Five Conversations About Peter Sellers” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2023. This is an essay that starts as an exploration of the writer’s burgeoning obsession with Peter Sellers, and more specifically his role in hijacking and derailing production of “Casino Royale”, the spy spoof, back during the late 60s. However what starts as a reported piece on how the film set erupts into chaos, soon devolves into its own chaos while the essay splits off into 5 different narrators, each with their own ideas of what the essays truly about.

Is it about how Peter and his oversized ego ruined “Casino Royale”? Is it about how society too long allowed terrible men to run the world? Could it be an exploration of the nature of the essay as a creative form? Or is Peter Sellers and his genius at impersonation really a vehicle through which the writer probes her own shifting identity as a bi-ethnic person? The answer’s yes.

“The Bullet Swallower” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2024. 1895. Antonio Sonoro is the most recent in a long line of ruthless men. He is good with his gun and is drawn to trouble however he’s also out of options and out of money. This drought has just ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his kids and wife, and so when he hears about this train that’s laden with gold and other treasures, he heads to Houston to rob it, with Hugo (his younger brother) with him. However once the heist goes awry and Hugo’s killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds he’s launched into a quest to get revenge that endangers not just his own life and his family, but his eternal soul as well.

1964. Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned singer and actor. However his comfortable life gets disrupted when he hears about a book which purports to tell the full history of his family starting with Abel and Cain. Back during its ancient pages, Jaime discovers the multitude of horrific crimes that his ancestors committed. And once this same mysterious figure from Antonio’s timeline turns up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he might be the one forced to pay for his ancestors’ crimes, unless he is able to learn the real story of his grandpa Antonio, who was the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family that is magical in its blood and epic in its scope, and loosely based on the author’s own great-grandpa, this tackles inter-generational trauma, border politics, and the legacies of colonialism and racism in a lush setting with stunning prose which asks who it is that pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether or not it’s possible to be better than our forebears.

Elizabeth is a great storyteller, bringing both Mexico and Texas to the page with a combination of magic and blood in this wildly entertaining and mesmerizing read. It’s a rollicking, inventive tour-de-force, and a book you don’t really read but fall into like a dream, violent and vivid. It’s part Western revenge narrative, part family epic, and part study of displacement and colonialism, it’s a Texas-Mexico book worth checking out.

“The Bullet Swallower” was named Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by CrimeReads, The Millions, Goodreads, StyleCaster, The EveryGirl, HipLatina, Book Riot, and Sunset. It was January Recommended Reading by Reading Between the Spines, Kirkus Reviews, Nerd Daily, The Washington Post, Book Nerd, and The Mary Sue.