There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven

March 1, 2024

A debut story collection that explores migration, newness, and injustice. A man wakes to find he is suddenly a reggaet�n star. An older woman changes into a puppet. Other characters include farmers, soldiers, and cyborgs. Through dreamlike changes, the characters face unrecognizable lives and hard choices in worlds ruled by technology and bureaucracy. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from May 13, 2024
Reyes debuts with a scintillating collection of stories in which Salvadoran characters reckon with new technologies and the evils of capitalism. The wry opener, “He Eats His Own,” follows a finance broker in Los Angeles who pays his relatives in San Salvador to grow and ship mangoes for him to eat, even as their work puts them in the crosshairs of gang violence­. In the pitch perfect “Try Again,” a bisexual Salvadoran American man pays a biotech company to transplant his late father’s brain tissue into a robot. After being rejected by his father because of his sexuality, he finally finds the acceptance he craved via the AI-powered robot. In “Self-Made Man,” one of the more devastating entries, a researcher uncovers a secret U.S. government program to create manual laborers from the reanimated corpses of undocumented Central Americans. The volume is shot through with genuine pathos and astute social commentary, and Reyes shifts effortlessly from absurdism to satire to sci-fi. These dynamic tales herald the arrival of a promising new talent. Agent: Aemilia Phillips, Stuart Krichevsky Literary.

Starred review from July 15, 2024
A debut collection of stories centered on the Salvadoran diaspora. Salvadoran American storyteller Reyes threads together tales blending family dynamics and the migratory challenges of the Latin American diaspora with an edge of the uncanny, surreal, and outlandish. In "He Eats His Own," Neto, a successful professional in Los Angeles and the child of Salvadoran immigrants, takes increasingly dangerous steps to satisfy an obsession with homegrown mangoes even as it unravels his relationship, leads to the deaths of relatives, and threatens to imprison his only surviving relation, an orphaned cousin who sobs when Neto gifts him a mango sapling, "an intense fear spreading from his throat all the way down to his green thumb." In "My Abuela, the Puppet," the narrator's grandmother slowly morphs into a marionette, beginning with her oversize orthopedic sneakers, until her knockoff Louis Vuitton handbag transforms into felt and her thinning frame leaves errant tufts of wool on bedsheets and her wheelchair. Abuela the Puppet hangs on a wall in the living room until one night she sings out in a strong voice: "Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta, y no llores." A series of searing vignettes punctuates the collection. Each one is titled "An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World," and they reimagine infamous episodes from Salvadoran history, such as the quick defeat of 16th-century colonizers or the ghastly rearrangement of Indigenous remains into the shape of a dinosaur that will be namedMaximilianodon, for the tyrant dictator who thought "drawing a little bit of blood once in a while was part of the job." Tethered to historical fact and enlivened by speculative elements, Reyes' fiction brings into focus the troubling legacies that stalk so many Central American nations: the enduring "belief that we can bury our monstrosities underneath a pile of ash and bones." Haunting, tender, and profound meditations on the experiences of Central American migrants and their families.

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Starred review from August 1, 2024
In every iteration, Salvadorans rewrite the narrative in this jewel-like collection from Reyes where past and future collide. There's an undercurrent of betrayal: the corrupt Salvadoran president, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, is imagined passing off indigenous bones as magnificent dinosaurs to a terrified nation; a Latino-owned corporation transforms dead migrants into compliant household cyborg-servants; even if Selena Quintanilla had escaped death, those who sing her songs are still doomed to a similar fate; and dead relatives haunt the young rather than provide comfort. The idea that to become successful, one must betray the self looms large in stories like ""Quiero Perrear! and Other Catastrophes,"" where an Ecuadorian American singer is offered a boost to her music career through a fake romance with a man who claims to have simply woken up a reggaeton star. Studded between longer stories, Reyes sets five ultra-short reimaginings of familiar narratives identically named ""An Alternate History of El Salvador or Perhaps the World."" Whether well-known or astonishingly new, the stories in this collection plumb a labyrinth of identity and duality explored through motifs like border crossings, citizens and immigrants, the imagined vs. the real, bisexuality, and the resurrection and destruction of family. An extraordinary debut of speculative fiction.

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