Fernando A. Flores

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times, Town & Country, and Alta"Flores's style has an exhilarating punk, D.I.Y. aplomb; it's as if he feels he's inventing literature for the first time." --Mark Leyner, The New York Times Book Review "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 its 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 Proserpina and Neftal . One of Three Rivers' last literate citizens, Neftal hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, whose last novel, Brother Bront , is finally in Neftal 's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftal and Proserpina, with the help of a wounded Bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel t as, 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 Bront is a mordant, gonzo romp through a ruined world that, in its dysfunction, tyranny, and disparity, 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.

One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2022These 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 TroublePsychedelic, 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 Fr d ric Chopin stumbles through Ciudad Ju rez 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.

Near future. 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 to Flores: a wonderfully weird, staggeringly smart new voice in American fiction, and a mythmaker of the highest order.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Los Angeles Times"Brother Bront evokes Octavia Butler, William Gibson, and John Steinbeck; these are all my favorites, and with this book, Fernando A. Flores joins the list." --Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore "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 Neftal --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 Bront , is finally in Neftal 's possession. But after a series of increasingly violent atrocities committed by Crick's forces, Neftal and Prosperina, with the help of a wounded bengal tigress, three scheming triplets, and an underground network of rebel t as, 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 Bront 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.