There is a Rio Grande in Heaven

Stories

Longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award • Finalist for The Story Prize • Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction • Finalist for the California Book Award • Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the New American Voices Award

"Ruben Reyes Jr. is a wonder." — Héctor Tobar

An electrifying debut story collection about Central American identity that spans past, present, and future worlds to reveal what happens when your life is no longer your own.

An ordinary man wakes one morning to discover he’s a famous reggaetón star. An aging abuela slowly morphs into a marionette puppet. A struggling academic discovers the horrifying cost of becoming a Self-Made Man.

In There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, Ruben Reyes Jr. conjures strange dreamlike worlds to explore what we would do if we woke up one morning and our lives were unrecognizable. Boundaries between the past, present, and future are blurred. Menacing technology and unchecked bureaucracy cut through everyday life with uncanny dread. The characters, from mango farmers to popstars to ex-guerilla fighters to cyborgs, are forced to make uncomfortable choices—choices that not only mean life or death, but might also allow them to be heard in a world set on silencing the voices of Central Americans.

Blazing with heart, humor, and inimitable style, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven subverts everything we think we know about migration and its consequences, capturing what it means to take up a new life—whether willfully or forced—with piercing and brilliant clarity. A gifted new storyteller and trailblazing stylist, Reyes not only transports to other worlds but alerts us to the heartache and injustice of our own.

Great stories, issues with the audiobook

The narrator really disrupts the flow of the story, there are awkward pauses every four or five words, and there's 0 acting or tonal inflection. It makes the writing sound bad when actually it's not. Even the last sentence of each story ended on an upward inflection, which messes with the gravity and finality of the words.
Also, the audiobook version messes up the "Variations on Your Migrant Life" choose your own adventure structure. Some of them are repeats and some are missing, and the instructions "If you choose to X, continue reading" - some of them are wrong. This should've been caught before the audiobook was published.