Carlos Nicolás Flores burst into the Latino/Chicano literary scene with his young adult novel, “Our House on Hueco,” in 2006. It received the Foreword Indie Silver Award for Juvenile Fiction. It was Flores’s depiction of what it was like for a young 10-year-old Mexican American boy to confront the discrimination and insults he encountered when his family moved from an El Paso barrio to a new house in the Anglo part of town.
Flores’ second novel, “Sex as a Political Condition-A Border Novel,” was published in 2015. In this novel, Flores writes about the South Texas border – the American and Mexican side, which serves as the setting for “a ribald satire of the male condition at the end of the Cold War” (Flores’ words for his novel). The fictional town of Escandón (in reality it is Laredo) is the setting for this novel and some of his other writings.
His third novel, “Pillars of Creation – A Quest for the Great Name in a Nietzschean World,” was published in July by Atmosphere Press. I jokingly told Carlos it seemed to be a philosophical treatise on the origin of existentialism, and perhaps he should change the title to something that will entice the public to buy and read his novel.
He angrily told me: “I don’t give a (expletive). That is the title I want, and I will not change it”…