Valleyesque

Stories

Valleyesque
Fernando A Flores
RRP:
NZ$ 29.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 22.49
Paperback
h191 x 127mm - 208pg
3 May 2022 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780374604134
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
One of The Millions' s Most Anticipated Books of 2022 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 Frederic Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Juarez 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.
[Flores' s] own strange stories are some of the best to come along in quite a while. This is an accomplished book from an author determined to keep literature weird. Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre. --Kirkus (starred review)Flores takes to the elusive and dangerous borderland in his inventive debut collection . . . 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. --Publishers WeeklyReading Valleyesque feels like entering a new dimension, a southwestern twilight zone where slacker outcasts and political gangsters rub elbows with hallucinatory muralists. But the genius of Flores' work is precisely that this is our world-- a reality seeped in humor and chaos with an undercurrent of divine order. We are lucky to have a writer so deeply unique, so ecstatically original as Fernando A. Flores. --Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & CorinaFernando A. Flores is a masterful stylist, ferrying language across back and forth across landscape, border, and social class to invent a literary voice like no other. Reading Flores always reminds me of no one but Flores: he' s one of the rare truly singular fiction writers of our time, and his stories are endlessly innovative, surprising, and fun. Valleyesque is not to be missed. --Matt Bell, author of AppleseedThe stories in Valleyesque are heartbreaking, hilarious, tender and hallucinogenic, often all at once. Fernando A. Flores' voice is unmistakable, authentic and true, and these stories - singular, psychedelic, sad and nimble - capture a writer at the height of his powers. From diners and coffee shops to one-bedroom apartments, these stories evoke the complex facets of Tejano culture and, like the best literature, make it universal. --Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt' s GardenPraise for Tears of the Trufflepig Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize[A] bonkers dystopia of deprivation and decadence. --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal[Tears of the Trufflepig] feels a bit like the classics of the novela negra of Latin America--think Paco Ignacio Taibo II or Rafael Bernal--were fused with a Philip K. Dick book. It' s darkly funny at times, to boot. --Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Washington PostA bizarre fever dream of a book. --Michael Schaub, Texas ObserverBizarre, macabre, and wryly funny. --Joshua Rivera, The NationThe most engagingly original novel I' ve read in ages. --Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior CircuitFernando A. Flores is the kind of writer who will reinvigorate your faith in the power of literature. " --Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the EarsA beautiful story about the struggle between the profane and the sacred and what we can do about it. " --Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the WorldFlores is funny and fierce and not to be forgotten. " --Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor. com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Tex
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780374604134
Published: 3 May 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: Farrar Straus Giroux
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Format: Paperback
Height: 191mm
Width: 127mm
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
Pages: 208

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