New Books (Gates, Eagleton, Flores)

Reviews of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Stony the Road,” Terry Eagleton’s “Humour,” and Fernando A. Flores’s “Tears of the Trufflepig.”

There’s a healthy dose of carnival in Fernando A. Flores’s Tears of the Trufflepig (FSG Originals, $16), a trippy debut novel set in a dystopian near-future South Texas. In this CRISPR-age bender that reads like a cross between Philip K. Dick’s *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* and a *narconovela*, drugs are legal and the cartels sell exotic animals generated via “filtering,” a technology for customizing and cheaply manufacturing organic life. Amid worldwide starvation and mass extinction, filtering produce has become a necessity. Filtering animals, however, is a glamorous crime. Instead of El Chapo, the verses of popular corridos exalt El Gordo Pacheco, a kingpin who kidnaps renowned scientists and forces them to engineer chimeras—silver-coated “moonfoxes,” ivory-billed parakeets—for black-market connoisseurs.