Gary's one of the enthusiasts for comic art in the newspaper reading room - a really nice and helpful guy.
Library of Congress' Headlines & Heroes September 16, 2026
https://blogs.loc.gov/
NEW RELEASE:
by José Alaniz
Release date: September 5, 2023
Author/cartoonist José Alaniz has released a new prose/comics collection titled Puro Pinche True Fictions (FlowerSong Press).
The hybrid book collects short stories and comics, mostly set in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas/Mexico border. The stories reflect the author’s upbringing in this region as a second-generation Mexican-American, at times fusing folk beliefs with Bradbury-style science fiction. For example, “Tamales” sets the immigration narrative on Mars in 2063, when a migrant family makes the crossing in search of work via (malfunctioning) rocket.
Other stories, like “Genoveva” and “Where You Stop the Story,” retell painful family episodes going back years and generations. The comics section, “Electric Youth,” recounts incidents from Alaniz’s childhood in South Texas, some of them told in Spanglish. These range from nostalgic (like one showing how common and pleasant it used to be to cross the river to Reynosa, Mexico for family outings) to funny/gross (the author’s memory of stepping on a nail) to self-flagellating (the reimagining of ethnic self-loathing through a Star Wars metaphor). This collection will appeal to readers with an interest in contemporary Chicano fiction and comics.
AUTHOR BIO
José Alaniz was born in Edinburg, TX, in the Rio Grande Valley along the US/Mexico border. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 with dual degrees in Radio-Television-Film Production and Russian Studies. He worked in Moscow, Russia as a journalist from 1993-1994. In 2003 he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Since 2003 he has worked as a comics scholar and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies. He has published three monographs: Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (2010, University Press of Mississippi); Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UPM, 2014) and Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia (Ohio State University Press, 2022). He has released two previous comics/prose collections: The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (2020) and The Compleat Moscow Calling (2023), both from Amatl Comix. His comics have also appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle anthology Dune, Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (2018), BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail (2020) and SCARFFF.
Dr. Alaniz is available for reading events, presentations and media appearances on any aspect of his creative and academic work.
FlowerSong Press site:
https://www.flowersongpress.
PRAISE FOR ‘PURO PINCHE TRUE FICTIONS’
Puro Pinche True Fictions is a beautiful, poignant and affecting, highly original, inventive and innovative mixed-genre book, full of quiet wisdom, by turns bittersweet and delightfully humorous. An uplifting, luminous work, putting this reader in the mind of the late great Abkhazian-Russian writer Fazil Iskander’s brilliant epic Sandro of Chegem.
— Mikhail Iossel, author of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire
From pop cultural musings to bloodcurdling family legends and pre-conquest lore, Alaniz folds time and space, inviting us to dip in. Serious and deeply probing as well as irreverent and rollicking fun, Alaniz joins our pantheon of greats like Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Dagoberto Gilb, Michele Seros, Myriam Gurba, and José Antonio Burciaga. Roll that top back and fasten tight those lap belts, ‘cause Puro Pinche is gonna take you for one heck of a ride.
— Frederick Luis Aldama is award-winning author and the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at UT Austin
The stories, pictures, and memories woven by José Alaniz touch the reader like a caress from Mnemosyne or a chingazo from Tezcatlipoca. A hybrid book poised between prose fiction and comics, Alaniz’s unique volume awakens readers to the mysteries and revelations of the Rio Grande Valley and worlds beyond.
— Dr. William “Memo” Nericcio, Curator of the Mextasy Circus of Desmadres and Professor, English and Comparative Literature, at San Diego State University
