Typically I love a book of weird short stories, but these were weird in an absurd way, and not a particularly fascinating way? Does that make sense? I haven't heard enough about this book to force my way through to the end. DNF two stories in.

I never got the chance to read this book as my managing editor prioritized other books I had pitched that were more salient with the magazine's mission. However I feel like I would have enjoyed reading it and exploring all the interesting themes that it touches on, as well as talking about the craft of the book. I would be very open to reading it at a much later stage. This is something that might give me more insight-looking at a book with fresh eyes.

If you like weird, strange, bizarre stories this is for you. There is a confused Chopin wandering the streets of Ciudad Juarez and angels eating birthday cakes. All of them set on the US-Mexican border. Many of them were too absurd for me, some were really good fun, but the ones I enjoyed the most were more serious ones, e.g. 29th of April on border violence.

Now THIS is a short story collection. I'm in awe with what Flores has achieved here. Valleyesque has got to be one of my favorites of the year.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.

Hace algo mas de dos años leí 'Tears of the Trufflepig', una de las novelas más locas que he tenido la oportunidad de leer donde se mezclaba humor negro, narcos, policías aduaneros, mafiosos, drogas, animales modificados genéticamente, acción y un sinfín de elementos que hacían de aquella historia situada en la frontera entre los EE. UU. y Méjico algo tan único como bizarro.

Su autor Fernando Flores, regresa a estos escenarios fronterizos para traernos una serie de historias cortas que siguen el patrón de aquella novela en cuanto a lo extraño y lo psicodélico. De hecho, no creo que me equivoque diciendo que las historias de 'Valleyesque' probablemente sean aún más asombrosas que las de 'Tears of the Trufflepig'.

Por mencionar algunas, el cuento donde vemos a Chopin intentando recuperar el piano que le han confiscado en la aduana mientras sigue en duelo por la muerte de su madre. Hay otra historia donde vemos a Lee Harvey Oswald, el asesino de JFK, intentando sacar adelante una carrera musical. Otro cuento donde vemos la camiseta de Zapata cobrando vida propia. Mucha crítica social ala gestión migratoria de los Estados Unidos, a las grandes corporaciones y el uso frecuente de palabras en español, algo menor que en su novela anterior,hacen de esta antología algo único.

Al mismo tiempo, es una antología para leer poco a poco. El nivel kafkiano que por momentos tienen las historias hacen que sean de lenta digestión, al menos para mi gusto. En cualquier caso, Fernando Flores tiene un estilo tan surrealista y bizarro que hace que no sea para todos los paladares. Hay cuentos más profundos y otros más superficiales, pero en cualquier caso Valleyesque es una antología totalmente distinta a lo que se puede leer habitualmente.

RATING: 4.5

Thank you to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and author Fernando A. Flores for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This anthology is one of the greatest examples of organizing a living and breathing world can be. "Valleyesque" is a glimpse into the reality of the Texas-Mexican Border society, discovering its people and culture, way way way beyond the known Mexican and Latine stereotypes we're used to seeing in media. It goes even further to being so authentic and specific, it actually reached some sort of universality - it's Mexican, but it could be so many unique cultures.

"Valleyesque" is, in its own way, a great word to describe this collection's way of presenting the world to us. Fernando has managed to find a very absurd and weird language - in a good way -, therefore making simple very powerful in their way of communicating. Close to Kafka, but also Zafonesque. I chose to start talking about this topic of the anthology, because I do think it is one of its strongest points, one of its main attractive points too, due to the fact this just won't be another ethnic story you'll be reading. It will feel like a magical world, a truthful yet misterious dimension of reality, where sadly a lot of awful things happen but it still manages to find itself alive. This language borders magical realism and absurdity, which sometimes disconnected me from the plot and made me feel confused, but not enough to make me give up on the book. In fact, Fernando is VERY consistent with the book's themes and developments, making "Valleyesque" one of the best anthologies I've ever come across.

This anthology feels like a living being, too. It not only showcases vivacity in its situations, but it's also somewhat timeless. I started to read it before the Ukrainian conflict started, and somethings took a whole another meaning after this new situation came to be in my own wordly reality. And what is very important to note here is, Fernando is shouting at us what generations and generations of Mexican immigrants have been trying to tell us about their living situation and their culture and feelings, and about the hipocracy they experience, much like any other ethnic "minority" anywhere else - including my country. I was able to find multiple passages that relate to the current indigenous situation in my country (Brazil), and was also able to identify with many other aspects as a Latina woman (myself) facing white culture.

The metalinguistic aspects of it too are important, questioning the Literary Industry and the Industry's way of putting cultural and individual works out there, of how it values authors and their stories. Fernando never misses an opportunity to use it as a metaphor for other things too, but it almost diverges from fiction when it stops to reflect on the book itself as a book, reminding us that "Valleyesque" is a portrait, thus a real world, not a fantasy (perception we get closer to due to the language when in fact, the absurdity just makes the cruelty of the real world more palatable).

If you're a fan of Carmen Maria Machado's "In The Dreamhouse", Franz Kafka's "The Trial", Cho Nam-Joo's "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982" and Fredrik Backman's "A Man Called Ove", you should give this one definitely a try.

I hope this one gets awards and hype, because it deserves it so much!

I enjoyed this way more than I thought I actually would. I think the prose in each of these stories is phenomenal and I can feel the love for the stories the author has when reading them. This book took me a bit out of my comfort zone in terms of what I normally read but t was amazing. I really love particularly the 29th of April and You Got It, Take It Away. Those stories really stuck with me and I'm still really thinking about them. It was a surprising great read for me. I think it handled some heavier themes really well while also keeping you consistently in the moment.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once gave a lecture about the dangers of what she calls “the one story.” In this talk, she explained that, when it comes to certain people and certain areas of the world, we have a narrative that has been fed to us that is one-sided and doesn’t accurately portray the whole story. She used, as an example, Mexicans because this was something she admitted she had developed one story over — strictly based on what she had heard through the American media. So, you may have heard that Mexicans have been detained at the U.S. border, separated from their families, and put in cages. You may have heard stereotypes such as that undocumented Mexicans are taking jobs away from white Americans. You may have heard a whole lot of stuff that is probably outright racist. Well, Mexican American author Fernando A. Flores is here to give you the whole story as to what it’s like to be Mexican American or Mexican. In his latest short-story collection, Valleyesque, he writes of the lives of people who live on the U.S.-Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley (or RGV, as he calls it). However, these are stories that are strange and unusual — and often defy convention.

There may be a reason why Flores often writes in such a fabulist style. One of them is that writing a realist story might be simply too painful a tale to tell. Another reason might be that life — and especially life as a person of colour — is simply absurd, and how could you render such life in a conventional style? Either way, the bulk of the stories in this volume are really weird, even by my weird-loving standards. I honestly feel that I’m probably not the best person equipped to write about them, as they are often — to a white, cis-gendered male with privilege — so far out in left field that the true understanding behind them is sometimes incomprehensible to me. So, it is thus that I found that the story I was most drawn to was “Nostradamus Baby,” a tale about a Mexican American couple who make a sculpture of a small child out of earwax that they’ve collected from their own ears. That’s just the framing device, however. The story is really about a writer who spends his time listening to other would-be writers describe their works in progress and offering critiques or encouragement on them, even though it’s obvious that these pieces in the making are quite terrible. Flores writes of privilege and the types of people who are likely to get stories published — usually NOT people of colour — and the story is a bit of a thesis statement on why Flores writes and why he writes the way he does.

It’s a bit of a shame, then, that “Nostradamus Baby” comes almost halfway into the collection, as it might have made more sense to put it right up front so that readers who might be not used to non-traditional fiction might have had a greater understanding of where Flores is coming from — thus making the rest of the collection all that more accessible. Otherwise, the going gets plenty weird and the weird turn pro rather quickly. There is, for example, a short piece about the world being ruled by possums — possibly a reference to people like Donald Trump. There’s another story about a Mexican American man who makes friends with a white racist, and they bond (sort of) over a piece of magical cloth that presumably came from a crashed alien aircraft. There’s another story about a woman who shops in a used clothing store, only to find that the landscape has changed and become unfamiliar — possibly a story about the refugee experience and winding up in a strange land in search of the American Dream. These are stories that make you think and wonder what the meaning is behind them. Still, the majority of these stories seem to have elusive meanings, and some may just be weird for the sake of being weird.

In many ways, Flores reminds me of a young Jonathan Lethem — Flores certainly has Lethem’s gifted intellect, even though Flores might not be as obviously sci-fi as Lethem was. And I’m sure that this collection might be meaningful to young Latinos trying to make sense of their lives in a country that sometimes doesn’t want them. However, it is a more realistic story about gang violence in Mexico that really packs a punch — it shows how gangs took over Mexico and took control of everything from the media to the military to the government just by killing everyone who stood in their path. It’s one of those stories that seem to be too weird to be true, but it is, alas. Thus, there are some really affecting stories in this collection, and it probably helps if you sit with them a bit and reflect on what they’re trying to say. Still, I must admit — again, from my position as a Caucasian English Canadian male — that Flores is a bit of an acquired taste. To best engage with these pieces and enjoy them, it probably helps to have some working knowledge of American politics and Mexican culture. That all said, if you’re looking for a challenge and want to be confronted by a different sort of reality in your reading diet, you may want to give Flores a try. Kelly Link blurbed this collection (and I loved Kelly Link’s most recent collection, Get in Trouble), so if she’s up your alley, then Valleyesque may have some appeal. Reading this book is a trip, as in the psychedelic kind, and it may have you rethinking that one story that you may have of people living life on the Rio Grande. For that reason, this book is certainly worth a look, even if you may have some trepidation about reading about stuff you just might not understand.

An unusual collection of short stories that will challenge the reader. Flores explores borders both real and imagined in these tales which veer from realistic to surreal. There's magical realism, there's a conversation between Flores and the reader, there's some odd stuff. These are best read one at a time over a period of days (my favored way of approaching most collections btw) because they demand more attention than you might expect. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary and experimental fiction,

Valleyesque is a collection of short stories that will take you to an unforgettable journey. These stories takes place in the Texas Mexican border and will give you lessons about the values of life.

My favorite stories including old Frederic Chopin who finds his old piano and is grieving at the death of his mother. Being a piano teacher and the fact that Chopin is one of my favorite composers, this story actually fascinated me. The other story that fascinated me was Lee Harvey Oswald--the person who assasinated John F Kennedy in 1963. and in the story, young Lee Harvey Oswald embarks on his musical career. There were some heartbreaking ones as well as some funny parts that will make you laugh out loud.

Overall, if you looking for a good set of short stories, I recommend this book for you all--truly the author has done an amazing job of drawing the reader into the story and making the reader feel like they are part of the story. Worth five stars!

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC. The review is based on my honest opinion only.

Engaging and non-flinching, this book does not shy from showing society at all angles. Hopping between different characters and backgrounds, Flores gives the reader a full picture of the Valleyesque people.

This book wasn't my cup of tea in subject matter, but it did have realized characters and writing that flowed well. The chapters are like little vignettes, giving glimpses. I was reminded of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street, in a way, where the main character isn't so much a person but a place. There is certainly an audience out there, perhaps fans of The Twilight Zone, who would be interested in this kind of book.

"Valleyesque" does a great job at both referencing various works of art and comment on 21st century issues, whilst not exploring them fully. A solid piece of fiction with Flores' prose being one of its best elements.

Valleyesque is a fever dream of a book in the best way possible. Flores’ combination of the uncanny with the downright absurd is done to highlight the actual absurdity of many harmful institutions that we, as readers, have been desensitized to and have normalized. All of Valleyesque’s stories are set in the liminal spaces of the US-Mexico border and focus on the experiences of the people who negotiate and live in these spaces.

As one progresses through Valleyesque, Flores’ myriad critiques and commentaries become increasingly clear. For instance, by including the scenarios of Chopin's piano getting stuck in customs, an Emiliano Zapata T-shirt coming to life, and a character getting lost in a labyrinth of clothes in a maquiladora, Flores is making a pointed critique of NAFTA and the hyper-exploitation faced by the Mexican working class as a result of that deal.

Additionally, there is a fair amount of meta-commentary within Valleyesque. Take “The Science Fair Protest,” wherein Efe asks “Do you think that once you’ve created a literary landscape, that landscape will be forever leaking back into the world? Even if one has never read this author—these people who don’t read are probably the ones who suffer the most leaks into their lives, actually,” or the entirety of “Nostradamus Baby” which is essentially a conversation between Flores and the reader about the author's motivations for writing this book.

Overall, my reading experience with Valleyesque was somewhat of a rollercoaster. Although I can intellectually appreciate and understand Flores’ employ of absurdity to tell these stories, it didn’t really make for an easy read. A majority of the time, my efforts to parse out the events of a previous paragraph were interrupted by the story twisting and going on a different tangent in the next, which resulted in a cycle of confusion. I think I would have better comprehended and enjoyed Valleyesque if I had read this book at a slower pace with a group of people. I definitely want to return to this collection if/when I find a group of people who want to read this book together.

Thank you to both NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals for providing me an advance copy of Fernando A. Flore’s literary fiction novel, Valleyesque, in exchange for an honest review.

Valleyesque is a collection of short stories that alternate between the genres of literary fiction and magical realism. The author has a unique writing style and the subject matter is rather eccentric, but there is something lyrical and innovative in the prose that compels the reader to finish the journey.

The author is imaginative and clever, referencing numerous artistic works and socioeconomic issues; rarely mentioning them directly. The author speaks in allusions, but in such an oblique way that the reader may miss the reference if they fail to read closely. Then, again, this style of writing and some of the topics may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Hence, the 3 stars (though I would give it a 3.75 if possible).

Notable stories:
- The Science Fair Protest
- Nocturne From A World Concave
- Zapata Foots The Bill
- Possums
- Ropa Usada
- Panchofire & Marina
- El Ritmo De La Noche
- You Got It, Take It Away

I will definitely be on the lookout for the author’s next novel.