Reading lists:
On Chilean Prose & Poetry:
El espacio narrativo en la novela chilena postdictatorial : casas habitadas by ISBN: 9004310606Publication Date: 2016.En El espacio narrativo en la novela chilena postdictatorial, Bieke Willem define un cambio de paradigma poético en la narrativa chilena más reciente a partir de un análisis de la representación del espacio.
Speaking the Earth's Languages by ISBN: 9401209162Publication Date: 2013-01-01Speaking the Earth's Languages brings together for the first time critical discussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and disciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of 'a nomad poetics' - not only for understanding Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the problems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes.
Books by Format:
Charleston and Other Stories by Call Number: PQ8097 .D617 C45 1997ISBN: 0879231971Publication Date: 1977-06-01Ana María.--Summertime.--The güero.--A lady.--The walk.--The closed door.--The Dane's place.--Charleston.--Santelices.
And a Body to Remember With by Call Number: PR9199.3.R5428 A8 1997ISBN: 9781551520445Publication Date: 2002-07-01and a body to remember with effectively combines elements of our Pulp past and Arsenal Pulp present. This is a collection of stories about rebellion and activism, while at the same time stories about the immigrant experience and emotional turmoil. Carmen Rodríguez explores place and language in this illuminating short-story collection based on her life as a political exile in Canada. The stories also form an intriguing document of self-translation: Carmen has lived in Chile and Canada, speaks Spanish and English, has written these stories in Spanish and English, and because of this has created a system of internal translation. Some of these pieces were first written in Spanish, others in English. Carmen found herself translating the stories back and forth, discovering new words and finding new ways of communicating her thoughts and feelings into another language, until Carmen "felt that both tips of my tongue and my two sets of ears were satisfied with the final product." and a body to remember with includes: a story about fleeing the enemy through the night-time jungle; a story about a woman, in a new place, who is tormented by her past when a shadowy figure begins following her around her new city; stories about suddenly leaving family and friends behind when a woman is forced to escape, narrowly, with her life; stories about the struggle to establish one's self, one's family, in a new country, a new culture, a new language; emotional stories of memory, love, longing, danger, dissent; political stories of activism, rebellion, retribution. And through it all resonates the voice of a woman determined to make the world into a reasonable, just, and safe place, whether in war-torn Chile, or foreign-like Canada. Evoking a Borges, dream-like quality, these are stories about women in transition, whose lives are conflicted by history, both personal and political. As a storyteller, Carmen maps the emotional terrain of dual geographies--caught between two worlds, her protagonists look for redemption in the simple truths of love and honour, whether amid the political turmoil of Chile, or the torment of estrangment in Canada. and a body to remember with was simultaneously published in Spanish as De Cuerpo Entero by Editorial Los Andes in Santiago, Chile.
Space Invaders by Call Number: PQ8098.16.E74 S6313 2019ISBN: 9781644450079Publication Date: 2019-11-05Space Invaders is the story of a group of childhood friends who, in adulthood, are preoccupied by uneasy memories and visions of their classmate Estrella González Jepsen. In their dreams, they catch glimpses of Estrella's braids, hear echoes of her voice, and read old letters that eventually, mysteriously, stopped arriving. They recall regimented school assemblies, nationalistic class performances, and a trip to the beach. Soon it becomes clear that Estrella's father was a ranking government officer implicated in the violent crimes of the Pinochet regime, and the question of what became of Estrella after she left school haunts her erstwhile friends. Growing up, these friends--from her pen pal, Maldonado, to her crush, Riquelme--were old enough to sense the danger and tension that surrounded them, but were powerless in the face of it. They could control only the stories they told one another and the "ghostly green bullets" they fired in the video game they played obsessively.One of the leading Latin American writers of her generation, Nona Fernández effortlessly builds a choral voice and constantly shifting image of young life in the waning years of the dictatorship. In her short but intricately layered novel, she summons the collective memory of a generation, rescuing felt truth from the oblivion of official history.
Martín Rivas by ISBN: 9780198026686Publication Date: 2000-01-01Widely acknowledged as the first Chilean novel, Martin Rivas (1862) by Alberto Blest Gana (1830-1920) is at once a passionate love story and an optimistic representation of Chilean nationhood. Written shortly after a decade of civil conflict, it is an indispensable source for understanding politics and society in nineteenth-century Chile.The hero of the story is Martin Rivas, an impoverished but ambitious youngster from the northern mining region of Chile, who is entrusted by his late father to the household of a wealthy and influential member of the Santiago elite. While living there, he falls in love with his guardian's daughter. The tale of their tortuous but ultimately successful love affair represents the author's desire for reconciliation between Chile's antagonistic regional and class interests. Indeed, many critics have interpreted Martin Rivas as a blueprint for national unity that emphasizes consensus over conflict.In addition to providing commentary about the mores of Chilean society, Blest Gana documents the enormous gap that existed between the rich and poor classes. An invaluable text for its portrayal of contemporary social, political, and class conditions, Martin Rivas illustrates the enriching influence that romanticism had on nineteenth-century Chilean literature.
Purgatory by ISBN: 9780520259720Publication Date: 2009-11-02Raúl Zurita's Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile's violent recent history.
Seeing Red by ISBN: 9781941920244Publication Date: 2016-02-23An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016" A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016" "A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." -- Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop "A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." -- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships. Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.
^ Also available in Spanish.
Chilean Poet by ISBN: 9780143109204Publication Date: 2023-02-14Alejandro Zambra returns with his most substantial work yet: a story of fathers and sons, ambition and failure, and what it means to make a family After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family--a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions--in Gonzalo's case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather's love of poetry. When, at eighteen, Vicente meets Pru, an American journalist literally and figuratively lost in Santiago, he encourages her to write about Chilean poets--not the famous, dead kind, your Nerudas or Mistrals or Bolaños, but rather the living, striving, everyday ones. Pru's research leads her into this eccentric community--another kind of family, dysfunctional but ultimately loving. Will it also lead Vicente and Gonzalo back to each other? In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments--sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound--that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships--a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend--it is a bold and brilliant new work by one of the most important writers of our time.
^ Also available in Spanish.
My Tender Matador by ISBN: 9780802141873Publication Date: 2005-02-10Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades. It is spring 1986 in the city of Santiago, and Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of the city's many poor neighborhoods works the Queen of the Corner, a hopeless and lonely romantic who embroiders linens for the wealthy and listens to boleros to drown out the gunshots and rioting in the streets. Along comes Carlos, a young, handsome man who befriends the aging homosexual and uses his house to store mysterious boxes and hold clandestine meetings. My Tender Matador is an extraordinary novel of revolution and forbidden love, and a stirring portrait of Chile at an historical crossroads. By turns funny and profoundly moving, Pedro Lemebel's lyrical prose offers an intimate window into the mind of Pinochet himself as the world of Carlos and the Queen prepares to collide with the dictator's own in a fantastic and unexpected way.
^ Also available in Spanish.
