Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and Alta

Flores's fiction possesses the aspect of a dream. --David L. Ulin, The Atlantic

This crazy cakey world-making of Fernando A. Flores is all of literature, wide, plaintive, melancholy and full of feminist fellow joyousness and ways. Hated this world ending, I want more. --Eileen Myles

Two women fight to save their dystopian border town--and literature--in this gonzo near-future adventure.

The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town's mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick's pockets.

Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí--the latter of whom, one of the town's last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Brontë, is finally in Neftalí's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftalí and Prosperina, with the help of a wounded bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel tías, rise up to reclaim their city--and in the process, unlock Rivas's connection to Three Rivers itself.

An adventure that only the acclaimed Fernando A. Flores could dream up, Brother Brontë is a mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, nonetheless feels uncannily like our own. With his most ambitious book yet, Flores once again bends what fiction can do, in the process crafting a moving and unforgettable story of perseverance.

In this exuberantly strange story collection, Flores asks: Whose reality? What rules? --Jean Chen Ho, 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.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE. One of Tor.com's Best Books of 2019.

Readers of this breakout work [will leave] thrilled and disoriented in equal measure. --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

One of The Daily Beast's Best Summer Beach Reads of 2019, one of Lit Hub and The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, one of Buzzfeed and Tor.com's Books to Read This Spring, and one of the Chicago Review of Books' Best New Books of May

A parallel universe. South Texas. A third border wall might be erected between the United States and Mexico, narcotics are legal and there's a new contraband on the market: filtered animals--species of animals brought back from extinction to 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 gets complicated after a swashbuckling journalist invites him to an underground dinner at which filtered animals are served. Bellacosa soon finds himself in the middle of an increasingly perilous and surreal journey, in the course of which 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 Tears of the Trufflepig is an absurdist take on life along the border, an ode to the myths of Mexican culture, and an introduction to a staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction.