Lena Valencia

Jan 24, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Lena Valencia

The woman with the pink hair doesn’t apologize as she muscles her way in front of Kyle with her boyfriend in tow, the oldest trick in the book since most men are more likely to move aside for someone with tits. Her boyfriend is younger than Kyle—and everyone else at the show—by at least two decades. There’s something achingly familiar about the lanky frame that he presses against Kyle as he passes, hard, almost aggressive, leaving a musk of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed hair in his wake.

Dec 6, 2024 | bigissue.com | Lena Valencia

Books The best in genre-bending fantasy, supernatural and horror fiction by: Lena Valencia Weird fiction sets fantasy, supernatural and horror fiction in a new light, making for some awe-inspiring tales. Here, genre-bending author Lena Valencia on the best radical reinterpretations of weird fiction. Two sparring sisters must set aside their differences to face down a murderer who has taken up residence on their mountain in 1980s rural Appalachia.

Aug 20, 2024 | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari |Lena Valencia

Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights, her first story collection, shimmers with eerie desert locations, from a screenwriter’s glamping trip near Joshua Tree to a heavily marketed premiere in Marfa and an “entrepreneurial wellness and self-actualization retreat” in the Mojave. She conjures up vivid characters with complicated relationships, and chill-inducing supernatural phenomena. Each story reverberates with strangeness and suspense. What was her inspiration?

Aug 7, 2024 | largeheartedboy.com | Lena Valencia

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights is one of the year’s strongest collections, filled with marvelously unsettling and sharply drawn stories.

Aug 7, 2024 | lithub.com | Lena Valencia

There’s a slipperiness to the landscape of the southwestern desert if you’re used to navigating a city. Scale works differently. There aren’t the usual buildings and trees to indicate how near or far you are from something. Article continues after advertisementTake Coyote Buttes South, in the Vermilion Cliff Wilderness of Southern Utah: the towering forms of undulating sandstone, striated in pink and white, shaped by a millennia of wind, were unlike any landscape I’d ever traversed.