How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories

by Daniel A. Olivas

Overview

How to Date a Flying Mexican is a collection of stories derived from Chicano and Mexican culture but ranging through fascinating literary worlds of magical realism, fairy tales, fables, and dystopian futures. Many of Daniel A. Olivas’s characters confront—both directly and obliquely— questions of morality, justice, and self-determination.

The collection is made up of Olivas’s favorite previously published stories, along with two new stories—one dystopian and the other magical— that challenge the Trump administration’s anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. How to Date a Flying Mexican draws together some of Olivas’s most unforgettable and strange tales, allowing readers to experience his very distinct, and very Chicano, fiction.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647790370
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Series:	New Oeste
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	859 KB

About the Author

Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, was born and raised near downtown Los Angeles. He is an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Widely anthologized, Olivas has written on culture and literature for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, Jewish Journal, High Country News, and The Guardian. He writes regularly for La Bloga, a site dedicated to Latinx literature and the arts. By day, Olivas is an attorney and makes his home in Southern California.

 

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction How to Date a Flying Mexican After the Revolution Elizondo Returns Home Good Things Happen at Tina’s Café Don de la Cruz and the Devil of Malibu Señor Sánchez Driving to Ventura Franz Kafka in Fresno The Fabricator Eurt The Fox Belén The Horned Toad Chock-Chock The Plumed Serpent of Los Angeles La Queenie Devil Talk Los Otros Coyotes The Chicano in You Permissions and Source Acknowledgments About the Author

Editorial Reviews

"In this multi-genre short story collection, Olivas explores magical realism, fairy tales, fables, and dystopian futures, all of which stem from Chicano and Mexican culture. While the exterior plots might be evocative and strange, its inner messages explore identity, grief, politics, and much more."
—Farrah Penn, BuzzFeed 

"How to Date a Flying Mexican is a beautifully realized work that comes out of the depths of the Mexican and Mexican American cultural experience."
—Michael Nava, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Olivas intertwines Chicana/o and Mexican culture and history such as gods, curanderismo, education, immigration, and many other important factors into each story. The flawless incorporation of these two identities mixed with the peculiar characters in magical plots makes for memorable and quirky tales.... It was an honor to step into his strange, little world."
—Melissa Gonzalez, Latinx in Publishing

"Prepare to be enchanted—there’s magic within."
—Stanford Magazine

"A skilled, creative, entertaining and thought-provoking writer who has impressively mastered the short story format, Daniel A. Olivas' new anthology, How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories, will prove to be a welcome addition to community, college, and university library Hispanic-American Literature collections."
—Midwest Book Review

"Daniel Olivas’ stories are going to stick with us for quite awhile. Empathetic, touching, intelligent, fierce, and poetic." 
—Writer's Bone

"Prompted by tragedy—the death of his father and the pandemic—Olivas revisits decades of writing to produce this collection of new and previously published stories. Olivas’s work is surreal, dystopian, critical, and introspective, ultimately moving into contemporary political rhetoric."
—Alta Journal

"Throughout all of his stories, there are strong Chicano characters, who embody tales that range from the laugh-out-loud funny to the heartbreaking. A timely retrospective from an important voice in Latinx literature."
—Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed 

"His new collection of short fiction . . . is at turns comic and tragic, and perhaps most poignant when it is both. Employing a range of genres and modes including dystopian science fiction, magical realism, and parable, Olivas uses a whimsical hand to tug at deeper truths about identity and society."
—David Nilsen, On the Seawall

"Polyhedral storyteller and polymath, Daniel Olivas does it again! From gritty realism to mythic and sci-fi speculative, Olivas dishes up an exquisite feast of short fictions filled to the brim with small and outsized everyday struggles—and failures. Through it all, we feel the mischievous wink and wry smile twinkle of an author whose incalculable talent and storytelling skills clear new space for us to breathe again in the richness of Latinx ways of life."
—Frederick Luis Aldama, award winning author and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at UT Austin  

“Daniel Olivas loves to tell stories and his writing reflects that joy. Every story is told with a wink and a smile, encouraging you to follow along for the ride. His humor not only brings levity to matters of life, death, and human treachery, but it is also a stylistic choice that Olivas has mastered. These stories aren’t so much about the interiority of its characters, but about the mythical, magical mundanity of our lives—Olivas’s style perfectly expresses this contradiction.”  
—Maceo Montoya, associate professor of Chicano/a Studies, University of California, Davis, and author of Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces

From the Publisher