In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose
reality? What rules? --Jean Chen Ho, author of The New York Times Book
Review
**
These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A.
Flores's deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those
overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of
the best contemporary fiction now lives. --Kelly Link, author of Get in
Trouble**
**
Psychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico
borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of
the Trufflepig.**
No one captures the border--its history and imagination, its danger,
contradiction, and redemption--like Fernando A. Flores, whose stories
reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. In
his immersive, uncanny borderland, things are never what they seem: a
world where the sun is both rising and setting, and where conniving
possums efficiently take over an entire town and rewrite its history.
The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the
hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. A dying Frédéric Chopin
stumbles through Ciudad Juárez in the aftermath of his mother's death,
attempting to recover his beloved piano that was seized at the border,
while a muralist is taken on a psychedelic journey by an airbrushed
Emiliano Zapata T-shirt. A woman is engulfed by a used-clothing
warehouse with a life of its own, and a grieving mother breathlessly
chronicles the demise of a town decimated by violence. In two separate
stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass
consumption. And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the
adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in
Texas.
Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque is
a boundary- and border-pushing collection from a one-of-a-kind stylist
and voice. With the visceral imagination that made his debut novel,
Tears of the Trufflepig, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of
the border to life--and beyond.
