Virtual Event: Fernando A. Flores

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes FERNANDO A. FLORES—author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig—for a discussion of his new collection Valleyesque: Stories. He will be joined in conversation by award-winning writer LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author most recently of the collection I Hold a Wolf By the Ears: Stories.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by pre-ordering a copy of Valleyesque on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Valleyesque

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 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. 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.

Praise for Valleyesque

"Reading Valleyesque feels like entering a new dimension, a southwestern twilight zone where slacker outcasts and political gangsters rub elbows with hallucinatory muralists. But the genius of Flores’ work is precisely that this is our world― a reality seeped in humor and chaos with an undercurrent of divine order. We are lucky to have a writer so deeply unique, so ecstatically original as Fernando A. Flores." ―Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina

"Fernando A. Flores is a masterful stylist, ferrying language across back and forth across landscape, border, and social class to invent a literary voice like no other. Reading Flores always reminds me of no one but Flores: he's one of the rare truly singular fiction writers of our time, and his stories are endlessly innovative, surprising, and fun. Valleyesque is not to be missed." ―Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

"The stories in Valleyesque are heartbreaking, hilarious, tender and hallucinogenic, often all at once. Fernando A. Flores' voice is unmistakable, authentic and true, and these stories - singular, psychedelic, sad and nimble - capture a writer at the height of his powers. From diners and coffee shops to one-bedroom apartments, these stories evoke the complex facets of Tejano culture and, like the best literature, make it universal." ―Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt's Garden