Valleyesque
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Surreal and Satirical Tales from the Texas-Mexico Borderland
"In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules?" —Jean Chen Ho, 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
Prepare to be captivated by the psychedelic and dazzling stories in Valleyesque, set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland. From an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig, Fernando A. Flores reimagines the border region with peerless style, where the fantastical and the hyperreal collide.
In this immersive, uncanny world, a dying Frédéric Chopin attempts to recover his seized piano in Ciudad Juárez, a woman becomes engulfed by a living used-clothing warehouse, and a young Lee Harvey Oswald embarks on a music career in Texas. Swinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, Valleyesque pushes boundaries with its unique tales.
With the same visceral imagination that made his debut novel a cult classic, Flores brings his singular vision of the border to life in this collection that will captivate fans of contemporary literature, dark humor, and surreal and experimental fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flores takes to the elusive and dangerous borderland in his inventive debut collection (after the novel Tears of the Trufflepig). In "Queso," a man interviews for a job at a fast food outlet, where he is rewarded for providing folksy details that testify to his authentic "Mexican" identity. The story sets the tone for the remarkable range on exhibit throughout, from surrealism to prescience. In "The Science Fair Protest," gangsters take over a school, and biology teacher Ram calls on his neighbor, the narrator, for help navigating the new teaching methods mandated by the gangsters. Flores seamlessly blends high and low references as Ram and the narrator get drunk and commiserate about the changes at the school while also listening to records by "the Mexican Neil Diamond" and discussing Proust and the Dreyfuss Affair. In "Nocturne from a World Concave," the composer Frédéric Chopin gets into a philosophical debate about the nature of reality in Ciudad Juárez. "Zapata Foots the Bill" involves a muralist attempting to accurately portray the legendary revolutionary, but viewers are disinterested or outright confused. The standout "The Oswald Variations" offers a hilarious and remarkable alternate history of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as an aspiring musician in Texas. Using a blend of experimentation and magical realism, this conveys the border's many sociopolitical shades. The zany set pieces add up to a work with explosive substance.
