Book description
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…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Valleyesque as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I’ve been a fan of Fernando A. Flores for a while, since—from off a table at a bookstore and based entirely on the title—I picked up a copy of his Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, because how could I not? Yet somehow, I missed when his latest book, Valleyesque, came out in 2022. Hence why these stories about a bee wrangler who loses his mother, violence in a border town not too close to the border, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s band are in a list of my favorites reads in 2024.
Each story in Valleyesque offers up…
These stories are all surreal, trippy, and many are quite funny. Sort of a mashup of Márquez, Burroughs, and Bukowski, trying to pin down Flores’ actual style is difficult as it is wholly unique: the ultimate compliment for a writer. One story is about a couple who make a sculpture of a baby using their ear wax while the male partner is a writer who also is paid to be a life coach to other writers of lesser talent. Another story is about two men who are neighbors, one of which owns an extraterrestrial shape-shifting cloth, the other is a…
From Scott's list on surreal, bizarro, funny fiction fix.
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