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

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. One of The Millions‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2022 Psychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. 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. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online through .įernando A. FREE and open to the public, all times Eastern. RSVP below to receive login information (our virtual events are held via Zoom). Fernando is in conversation with Zach Powers, novelist and Artistic Director at The Writer’s Center. Flores to discuss his groundbreaking new story collection, Valleyesque. The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by novelist and story writer Fernando A.

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