Fernando A. Flores’s second novel, *Brother Brontë, was released this past February to rapturous reviews. Fernando, a modern day bluesman and an encyclopedic data bank of niche literature, music and film, then embarked on a Texas and West Coast tour. So naturally we asked him to document it. Here it is.*
My ride to the airport is from a man named Harold. His white car has Florida plates, and when he pops the trunk for my bag I notice the thin blue line sticker on the back windshield. I don’t feel like starting shit so I just say hello. Both of Harold’s ears are pierced. He tells me his English isn’t very good—I don’t feel like telling him I know Spanish. We drive to the airport listening to reggaeton at a moderate volume and never speak again.
Once in Dallas, I head to the bookstore/bar Wild Detectives before my reading, and it feels so good to be in a space that carries such a wide variety of literature and records with their limited space. Last time I was here, in 2019, I saw the avant-garde jazz musician Peter Brötzmann, just chilling, the day after (or before?) he’d played a show. I left him alone, of course. He died a few years ago—should I have bothered him or something?
I love a bookstore located at the heart of a city’s downtown, and Deep Vellum Books might just be my favorite of these. Riley, the bookseller there, has admirably read the book twice already and asks deep, insightful questions. I met Riley in Brooklyn during my first book tour with Tears of the Trufflepig, so it feels extra special to be speaking with her here in Texas. The audience is incredibly generous and engaged. Afterward, Will Evans, the founder of Deep Vellum, recommends an array of titles they’ve published, and I, of course, walk away with every single one, like their forthcoming Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, Plasmas by Céline Minard, and the latest by the mystifying writer Mario Bellatin.
I land in Tulsa a few days later, on a Monday. The locals keep telling me there’s a storm coming—are people excited for it? Seems like they are. I remember like 23 years ago or so a crew of my Rio Grande Valley friends drove up to Tulsa to catch a Dashboard Confessional show, and they, too, ended up getting caught in a snowstorm, but drove all the way down anyway right after the show.
Magic City Books is by the railroad tracks and looks like it could have been a warehouse or speakeasy. Half the store is fiction, half non-fiction, and the selection carefully curated with a wide range of big and indie titles. After my event I get an automated text that my plane might be delayed due to the snowstorm.
My flight gets pushed back about four hours, and once onboard the ground crew spray a thick pink and green slime all over the plane—my first time watching this. The plane takes off smoothly thanks, I’m sure, to the slime, as the snow shoots down.
Houston is immediately a blur—I can never get a grip on what’s going on in this town or where anything is. I forget my camera, and only realize it upon landing. It’s my third airport, not counting Austin’s, in a week, and I’m lit up with immune booster pills. I think of the Huddie Ledbetter lyrics: “If you ever go to Houston/ well you better walk right/ you better not stumble/ and you better not fight/ Sherriff Rocko will arrest you/ Eddie Boone will take you down/ and I’ll bet you bottom dollar/ penitentiary bound/”, but still I have fun at my event at Brazos Bookstore nonetheless. I pick up a copy of The Island of Doctor Moreau, since it’s been on my mind, and I’m not sure if I’ve actually read it.
The morning I fly back to Austin I receive news that a glowing longform review of Brother Brontë has appeared in The Atlantic, and a feeling of euphoria caps off the first half of the tour. The review puts me in a good place, comforted that people seem to be ‘getting’ the book. I do my best to rest and mentally prepare for doing four days in three cities: Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle.
All along this tour, I’m reading Edwin Frank’s book about the 20th century novel, Stranger Than Fiction—-it seems to be the only thing I can concentrate on, and I’m eating it up. It’s what influenced my purchase of Moreau, and throughout the trip I’m looking out for books Frank mentions that I might have missed.
Immediately upon landing in LA and getting into a taxi to Pasadena, it feels wonderful to be here—it’s seventy-ish degrees, and we’re driving with the windows down, I could cry. After checking into the hotel, I take a walk and stumble into Vroman’s Bookstore by chance, where I end up signing a pile of books. I feel so grateful for my fellow booksellers everywhere, they’ve all been so kind and enthusiastic.
I admit I’m nervous to talk to fellow MCD author Héctor Tobar—it’s the first time I’m being asked questions by a Pulitzer Prize winner. I feel that it should be me asking him the questions, picking his brain about the process. North Figueroa Bookshop is also by a railroad track, and feels like it probably makes a cameo in a Tom Waits song. The place fills up and afterward a few people tell me how inspired they are to write.
The next day I fly to Portland, where I immediately go to Mississippi Records. Eric, the owner, shows me their stash of epic cassette tape mixes in the back room. I don’t allow myself to browse the record selection any further, and walk away with two tall stacks of cassettes filled with obscure music, with names like Beware the Lake of Fire, Sitting on Eternity, and the horror soundtrack music of The Sound of Fear Volumes 1 and 2, for me and a coworker at the bookstore—too many, probably, but at four bucks apiece they’re a steal. I have dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant recommended by Eric, and pass out as soon as I get to the hotel, for the following day I have to speak to two different classes at Reed College, then a reading in the evening.
I run out of immune system booster pills on my day at Reed College, Thursday, and get paranoid I’m going to get sick and miss out on my last stop: Seattle. But everything goes smoothly, and the following day I even get to sneak in a little cardio workout before heading to Third Place Books early to sign 160 copies of Brother Brontë for their book subscription members. Some of the booksellers and I follow each other on social media, so it’s great to talk books in person with all of them before the event, and pick up a few of their recommendations. A lot of behind-the-scenes work happens at book events, and, again, I’m very grateful for all the booksellers I’ve encountered on this tour.
The booksellers at Third Place give me a few gifts themed on Brother Brontë: a laminated Three Rivers (the setting of my novel) Public Library card, and a bookmarker with a quote from the book: “It’s you who will set the record straight for the generation after us. Long after I am gone, and Mama here is gone, someone is going to have to keep all these stories going,” floating by a marvelous illustration of the book shredder. I want to melt into a puddle: I’m so moved.
On my final morning, hours before flying out to Austin, I find a little diner right on a streetcorner that looks like it could belong in any of the cities I visited. There’s nobody when I walk inside, and near the back, in an elevated section, is a huge finely crafted mural that looks like it could be a window or portal to another time and place. Maybe rural France or Ireland. I have a satisfying breakfast right by the painted rabbits, grateful not to be too hungover.
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...
