Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas by Fernando A. Flores

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.When I was in a band, my local punk and metal underground scene had long waned out. 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.

And in the final tale, Flores pieces together the adventures of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as he starts a music career in Texas. In two separate stories, queso dip and musical rhythms are bottled up and sold for mass consumption. 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. 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. The stories in Valleyesque dance between the fantastical and the hyperreal with dexterous, often hilarious flair. 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. Flores, whose stories reimagine and reinterpret the region's existence with peerless style. No one captures the border-its history and imagination, its danger, contradiction, and redemption-like Fernando A. Psychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig. 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. These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 You may then see a window reading 'waiting for host to start webinar,' but sit tight-you will be admitted as soon as we begin broadcasting live! You will be able to submit questions using the Q&A feature.Įnjoying At Home with Literati? Donate $5 to sustain our programming here. You will be prompted to enter a first name and email upon joining. Note: we are now hosting on Zoom webinars. He will be joined in conversation by Matt Bell.Ĭlick here to join the webinar event on 5/11. Flores to our At Home with Literati Series in support of Valleyesque.

Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas by Fernando A. Flores