{"product_id":"valleyesque-stories-9780374604134","title":"Valleyesque: Stories","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules?\" --Jean Chen Ho, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores's deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives.\" --Kelly Link, author of \u003ci\u003eGet in Trouble\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePsychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of \u003ci\u003eTears of the Trufflepig. \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eNo 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe stories in \u003ci\u003eValleyesque \u003c\/i\u003edance 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSwinging between satire and surrealism, grief and joy, \u003ci\u003eValleyesque\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eTears of the Trufflepig\u003c\/i\u003e, a cult classic, Flores brings his vision of the border to life--and beyond.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFernando A. Flores\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection \u003ci\u003eDeath to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas\u003c\/i\u003e and the novel \u003ci\u003eTears of the Trufflepig\u003c\/i\u003e, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e American Short Fiction, Ploughshares\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e Frieze\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e Porter House Review\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Tex\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"MCD X Fsg Originals","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50644681982226,"sku":"9780374604134","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_3b0c929f-7ce9-473d-b916-6e9f97f741b5.jpg?v=1733122008","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/valleyesque-stories-9780374604134","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}