Join us for a very special y chingon evening with Texas writer Fernando Flores as he reads from his latest briliant BIPOC dystopian novel Brother Bronte. Fernando will be joined in conversation with Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta.
In Brother Bronte 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 Neftalí. One of Three Rivers’ last literate citizens, Neftalí 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 Proserpina, 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, 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.
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collections Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and Valleyesque and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. His latest novel Brother Bronte was published in 2023. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is a queer anarchist anti-zionist Jewish Nicaragüense artist, poet, and sexual health educator from the lands of the Tongva people who now lives in Yelamu, Ramaytush Ohlone territory.
This event is part of the San Francisco International Flor Y Canto Literary Festival. which happens Friday June 20th-Sunday June 22nd here in La Mision. For a full schedule of events go to the IG page; sfflorycanto