Emily Vance Brown

by Fernando A. Flores

4/5

I heard about Fernando Flores’s writing first when I still lived in Texas—he’s a local Austin author who’s well known there for his book Tears of the Trufflepig. I never had the chance to read any of his work before I left, although I always meant to. I saw this book at my favorite bookstore here in Brooklyn and knew it was finally time! I really enjoyed Valleyesque, and I’m hoping to lend it out to several of my friends soon. 

This collection would be a great fit for fans of Kelly Link (whose short stories I also just read for the first time a few weeks ago). Flores’s stories are surreal magical realism with a strong Texas borderlands twist. They start strong with a musing on the hypothetical origins of queso (one of my favorite stories in the collection) and end with a reimagining of the many lives of Lee Harvey Oswald. And there’s pretty much everything else you can imagine in between!