Valleyesque : stories / Fernando A. Flores.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Flores, Fernando A., 1982- author.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mexican-American Border Region--Fiction.

Mexican-American Border Region.

Genre:

short stories.

Short stories.

Satirical literature.

Physical Description:

193 pages ; 20 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : MCD x FSG Originals/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Summary:

"Short stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland"-- Provided by publisher.

"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 Fřďric Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Jùrez 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." -- Amazon.

Contents:

Queso

The science fair protest

Nocturne from a world concave

The 29th of April

Zapata foots the bill

Nostradamus baby

Possums

A Portrait of Simón Bolívar Buckner

Ropa Usada

Panchofire & Marina

El ritmo de la noche

You got it, take it away

Pheasants

The Oswald variations.

Notes:

"MCD x FSG Originals."

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

ISBN:

9780374604134

0374604134

OCLC:

1286674443