Here are 2 books that State of Paradise fans have personally recommended if you like
State of Paradise.
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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 a world so vividly rendered I put down the book feeling I’d physically been to each one of them—notwithstanding that these worlds include feathered angels, wax babies, Chopin in a luchador mask, and a Greek chorus of City Girls in the Chulas Fronteras Ropa Usada. As a character in one…
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…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
The Anthropologists—like the documentary its narrator, Asya, films each day—is fundamentally a story about the “unremarkable grace” of daily life. That’s the thing about grace though, it’s never unremarkable, only unnoticed. Not here though.
This is a story of an adopted city, an apartment, a cafe, a park—and the life happily married couple, Asya and Manu, live, moment by mostly quiet moment, in these places; the community and the language and the artifacts and the rituals and the daily practices that emerge—that are built—when one lives away from the place they were born, away from the community and the language and the artifacts and the rituals and the daily practices that are both specific to that other place and, also, a part of who one is.
Honestly, I don’t think I can do better at describing the magic of this book than Cara Blue Adams' essay in The Baffler—so check…
A Dakota Johnson x TeaTime Book Club Pick New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Selection A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
"The Anthropologists is mesmerizing; I felt I read it in a single breath." -Garth Greenwell "Savas is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows." -Bryan Washington
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family?
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from…
