Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club is a collection of short stories by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, published in 2012 by Cinco Puntos Press.

The book compiles seven short stories, all set in the Hispanic/Latino community in El Paso, Texas in the United States and its neighbouring city of Juárez, Chihuahua in Mexico.

[1] The Kentucky Club, a real-life bar a few blocks south of the border crossing in Juárez, appears in all seven stories as a linking motif.

[1][2] In addition, all seven stories touch in some way on themes of survival, of trying to live through pain, grief and loss and of the struggle to find and maintain love, both within the protagonists' birth families and in their sexual or romantic relationships.

[2] Several also touch on the outbreak of violent crime that engulfed Juárez in the 1990s, and the ways in which that fractured the interrelated cross-border culture of the two cities.

Javier sometimes cuts theirs visits short as he has to spend time with his terminally ill uncle at the nearby hospital.

One day, he receives a call from mutual friends Magda and Sofia regarding a watch of Javier that was found before his disappearance.

In 1985, Nick Guerra is released from the hospital in El Paso after being treated for assault wounds and returns to living with his parents.

One day after work, he decides to go to a bar called the Regal Beagle; there, he meets Sylvia, a woman much older than him.

When he arrives home, he lays in bed thinking of English and Spanish words and phrases before falling asleep.

As time passes, he applies and is admitted into his top-choice school Georgetown, but his father starts to develop a severe drug addiction and even hosts a party at the house.

On the morning before a graduation party, Ernesto "Neto" Zaragoza smokes and listen to music at the river before attending the celebration that night.

Years later, Neto returns to the desert on a rainy night and wistfully screams "Brian Stillman" repeatedly as if it was a song.