Valleyesque

"In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules?" —Jean Chen Ho, author of The New York Times Book Review "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 Get in Trouble Psychedelic, dazzling stories set in the cracks of the Texas-Mexico borderland, from an iconoclastic storyteller and the author of Tears of the Trufflepig. 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.

One of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 and one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com's Books to Read This Spring “Funny, futuristic, phenomenal, Fernando A. Flores is from another galaxy. Fasten your seat belt. You are in for a stupendous ride.” —Sandra Cisneros A parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals—species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet and avoid the dangerous syndicates who make their money through trafficking. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous, surreal, psychedelic journey, where he encounters legends of the long-disappeared Aranaña Indian tribe and their object of worship: the mysterious Trufflepig, said to possess strange powers. Written with infectious verve, bold imagination, and oddball humor, Fernando A. Flores’s debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, a dire warning against the one percent’s determination to dictate society’s decline, and a nuanced investigation of loss. It’s also the perfect introduction for Flores: a wonderfully weird, staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction, and a mythmaker of the highest order.

"[The Doloriad] just might be what your rotten little heart deserves." —J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by i-D, Cosmopolitan, Thrillist, Lit Reactor, and Lit Hub, and one of Nylon's March 2022 Books to Add to Your Reading List Macabre, provocative, depraved, and unforgettable, The Doloriad marks the debut of Missouri Williams, a terrifyingly original new voice In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a deserted city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over again, though her children are not so certain. Together the family scavenges supplies and attempts to cultivate the poisoned earth. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes of a TV show in which a problem-solving medieval saint faces down a sequence of logical and ethical dilemmas. But one day the Matriarch dreams of another group of survivors and sends away one of her daughters, the legless Dolores, as a marriage offering. When Dolores returns the next day, her reappearance triggers the breakdown of the Matriarch’s fragile order, and the control she wields over their sprawling family begins to weaken. Told in extraordinary, intricate prose that moves with a life of its own, and at times striking with the power of physical force, Missouri Williams’s debut novel is a blazingly original document of depravity and salvation. Gothic and strange, moving and disquieting, and often hilarious, The Doloriad stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life.

Fiction. Music. DEATH TO THE BULLSHIT ARTISTS OF SOUTH TEXAS is a psychedelic romp through the Rio Grande Valley music scene. This collection of 10 punk rock fairy-tales offers a prismatic view of a subculture so rich that if it knew its own worth, it just might revolt against itself. This is the book you wish you had as a teenager, headphones on, waiting at a bus stop for a ride to the record store.

This eye-opening narrative journey into the rapidly changing world of artificial intelligence reveals the dangerous ways AI is exploiting the unconscious habits of our minds, and the real threat it poses to humanity: "The best book I have ever read about AI" (New York Times bestselling author Roger McNamee). Artificial intelligence is about to amplify the most primitive version of who we are, and spit it back at us for entertainment and profit. That's the warning from award-winning technology journalist Jacob Ward, whose decade-long journey through the cutting edge of AI and behavioral science reveals that we're on the verge of becoming caught in The Loop: a shrinking cycle of narrowed choices and lost skills that will turn us away from expertise, human connection, and creativity if we don't act fast. From biometric surveillance states that track the movements and relationships of over a billion people, to the algorithms that determine what movies get made, to the risky multiple-choice simplicity of automated battlefield systems, this book reveals that the most obvious patterns in our behavior--patterns that AI is most likely to vacuum up--are not the ones we want to perpetuate. As the tech industry begins writing flawed human habits into AI, The Loop is a call to look at ourselves more clearly, so we can put only the best parts of ourselves into the systems we create.

As a Walker between worlds, Del is responsible for the love of her life—and the fate of millions—in this thrilling sequel to Dissonance. As School Library Journal raves, “O’Rourke brilliantly builds an intricate and complex alternate science-fiction universe…fans will be longing for the next installment.” Del risked everything to save Simon, and now he’s gone, off in another world with no way for Del to find him. She’s back at the Consort—training to be a Walker like everyone in her family. But the Free Walkers have other plans for her. This rebel group is trying to convince Del that the Consort is evil, and that her parents are unwittingly helping the Consort kill millions of people. The Free Walkers make Del the ultimate promise: if Del joins their fight, she will be reunited with Simon. In agreeing, Del might be endangering her family. But if she doesn’t, innocent people will die, and Simon will be lost to her forever. The fate of the multiverse depends on her choice...

This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians.

"Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep is weird in all the best ways possible . . . These tales are plucked from bizarre worlds, from the blood of shadow creatures, from the tears of angels. Let them haunt you.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home A collection of short stories moving through time and place, exploring the spaces where we haunt each other and ourselves through our choices, our institutions, and our dreams. Adam Soto, author of the debut novel This Weightless World, which Robin Sloan called “The social novel for the 21st century,” returns with Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep. In the title story, a one-armed Harlem Hellfighter goes in search of his specially altered military uniform while Influenza ravages Philadelphia. In “Sleepy Things,” a man is bound to the bedside of his comatose girlfriend who haunts his mother’s dreams. In “Wren & Riley,” a couple travels to Wyoming to visit a childhood friend who killed her abusive husband. And in “The Vegetable Church,” a pair of Syrian sisters, refugees of the civil war, find themselves at a crossroads in the home of their European hosts while their dead father whispers to them words of comfort and guidance. The stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep, strange and unsettling, explore the quiet spaces where the living and the dead alike haunt one another through their choices, dreams, and institutions.