Download or read book By Night in Chile written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2003-12-17 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger, and General Augusto Pinochet - whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine - as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched his own."--Jacket.
Download or read book Secret Weavers written by Marjorie Agosín and published by White Pine Press (NY). This book was released on 1992 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology traces the history of fantastic literature in Chile and Argentina. The stories include fairy tales, science fiction, and metaphorical political tales.
Download or read book My Documents written by Alejandro Zambra and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archived in a folder on award-winning author Alejandro Zambra's desktop are 11 stories of liars and ghosts, armed bandits and young lovers. Intimate, mysterious, and uncanny, these stories reveal a mind that is as undeniably singular as it is universal. Together, they constitute the debut short-story collection from Zambra, whose first novel was heralded as a “bloodletting in Chilean literature.” Whether chronicling the return of a mercurial godson or the disappearance of a trusted cousin, the worlds of these stories are so powerful and deep that the works might better be described as brief novels. My Documents is by turns hilarious and heart-stopping, tragic and tender, but most of all, it is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.
Download or read book Multiple Choice written by Alejandro Zambra and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "brilliant, innovative, beautiful" (The Guardian) book from the acclaimed author of Chilean Poet "Dazzling . . . a work of parody, but also of poetry." —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE GUARDIAN, AND THE IRISH TIMES “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker), Alejandro Zambra is celebrated around the world for his strikingly original, slyly funny, daringly unconventional fiction. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with his most audaciously brilliant book yet. Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to respond to virtuoso language exercises and short narrative passages through multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one in which the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning, and the nature of storytelling itself is called into question. At once funny, poignant, and political, Multiple Choice is about love and family, authoritarianism and its legacies, and the conviction that, rather than learning to think for ourselves, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition and playful in its execution, it confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, ELLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, THE MILLIONS, VOX, LIT HUB, THE BBC, THE GUARDIAN AND PUREWOW
Download or read book Chile written by Katherine Silver and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traverse Chile's diverse literary and geographic landscape with its best contemporary writers. Arranged geographically, these 20 stories-many of which appear in English for the first time-guide the reader through Chile's unique regions. Let Ariel Dorfman take you to Santiago with a prodigal son, discovering his own country for the first time; travel to the remote south with Enrique Valdes; and enjoy the charms of Valparaiso with Pablo Neruda, one of Chile's two Nobel Prize winners. With the return of democracy to Chile, large numbers of Americans and Chilean expatriates are rediscovering the rich cultural allure of Chile, as well as the draw of its unrivaled ecodiversity. Chile is an excellent literary guide for globetrotters and armchair travelers alike-for those new to Chile as well as those familiar with its charms. Katherine Silver is a freelance translator, editor, teacher and writer who has lived in Chile frequently and for prolonged periods from 1979 to the present. She has translated the Il Postino by Antonio Skarmeta, as well as the works of Elena Poniatowska, Jose Emilio Pacheco and Martin Adan. She is currently translating Pedro Lemebel's I Tremble Toreador for Grove/Atlantic Press.
Download or read book The Savage Detectives Reread written by David Kurnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.
Download or read book Ways of Going Home written by Alejandro Zambra and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn't sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.
Download or read book Nine Moons written by Gabriela Wiener and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction. Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss. Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak. With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision. While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species. Praise for Sexographies “No other writer in the Spanish-speaking world is as fiercely independent and thoroughly irreverent as Gabriela Wiener. Constantly testing the limits of genre and gender, Wiener´s work as a cronista (which roughly translates, but is by no means a direct synonym, of nonfiction writer) has bravely unveiled truths some may prefer remain concealed about a range of topics, from the daily life of polymorphous desire to the tiring labor of maternity.” —Cristina Rivera Garza, author of The Iliac Crest “This collection of essays [opens] on the outskirts of Lima, jumps to a swinger’s party in Barcelona, and next a squirt expert’s apartment. This book can feel psychologically hazardous to read; it pushes you to answer the questions Wiener asks herself: Would I? Could I? Will I?” —Angela Ledgerwood, Esquire Best Books of 2018 “These are essays of unabashed honesty and uncommon freedom of mind, bravely reported and beautifully composed. I hadn’t known how hungry I’d been for this book, how I’d needed it and wanted other books to be it. Sexographies is an antidote and a revelation, and Gabriela Wiener is a brilliant documenter of sex and life as they really are.” —Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others “In her native Peru, Gabriela Wiener has a reputation as a gonzo journalist who takes an active role in whatever subject she investigates, which as often as not involves sex, and not the vanilla variety. In this collection, her first translated into English, we meet a notorious polygamous pornographer; go to 6&9, a Barcelona sex club; interview the cruel Lady Monique de Nemours, a world-class dominatrix; visit Vanessa, a member of the European community of Latin American trans sex workers; get a first-hand look at the perils of threesomes; and explore other topics a tad too risqué to even name in a family newspaper. Suffice to say, Wiener’s free-wheeling style is hugely entertaining.” —Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star "Reading Gabriela Wiener is a joy. Over the years, her work has made me cry, laugh, hurt, and most importantly, dream. Her essays are daring, intimate, and honest, containing the self-awareness of a poet and the sharp focus of a marksman. I'd follow her anywhere." —Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles “One of the most interesting writers of this generation is Gabriela Wiener, a Peruvian journalist best known for her high-spirited explorations of female sexuality.... Wiener is witty and fast-paced; many of her experiences, sexual and otherwise, are hard-won, territories explored and sometimes conquered, despite her neurotic misgivings, with courage and aplomb. Part of her appeal lies in the fact that she sometimes writes about sexual topics that have not been well explored, especially by women, and a sense of incredulity is part of the pleasure of reading her work. ‘Is she really going to do that?’ the reader wonders. ‘Is she really going to write (and so openly) about doing that?’ And then she does, and there’s a slight but perceptible shift in the world because she did.” —Lisa Fetchko, Los Angeles Review of Books “With sizzling prose and journalistic attentiveness, Wiener honors the no-clothes rule. She exposes her readers to not only her body, but also to the neuroses, fears, and fantasies that come with it. True to the first-person style of gonzo journalism, each of Wiener’s fifteen transgressive crónicas pull readers into penetrative commentaries on infidelity, abortion, and threesomes, not to mention the ever-elusory ‘Ninja Squirt.’... Sexographies strikes the delicate balance between carnal and curious…. It [expands] the meaning of what pleasure in life can be, sexual or otherwise.” —Madeline Day, The Paris Review “What Peruvian essayist and “gonzo” journalist, Wiener, does in this collection is endlessly fascinating. Whether experiencing sexual subcultures or an ayahuasca trip, she uses herself as the point of departure to delve into the infinite manifestations of being human.” — Keaton, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX), Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian sex writer, and Sexografias is a book of her collected essays. However, she doesn’t just stay on the carnal, and uses her explorations of egg donation, swingers parties, cruising, and squirting as channels into meditations on motherhood, death, and immigration, all while staying sharp and funny and wild.” — Alejandra Oliva, Remezcla
Download or read book What is Secret written by Marjorie Agosín and published by White Pine Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only work of its kind in English or Spanish
Download or read book The Insufferable Gaucho written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat. The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho — unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire — might concern a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the familye state on the Pampas, now gone to wrack and ruin. These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.
Download or read book The Private Lives of Trees written by Alejandro Zambra and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Worried that his wife Veronica will not return home from an art class, Julian imagines his stepdaughter Daniela's future without her mother and tells her an improvisional bedtime story.
Download or read book Salt in the Sand written by Lessie Jo Frazier and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-17 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA study of memory regimes in popular and official Chilean thought./div
Download or read book Chilean Poet written by Alejandro Zambra and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S “BOOKS WE LOVE” “A tender and funny story about love, family and the peculiar position of being a stepparent…[Chilean Poet] broadens the author’s scope and quite likely his international reputation.” —Los Angeles Times “Zambra [is] one of the most brilliant Latin American writers of his generation.” —The New York Review of Books “Zambra's books have long shown him to be a writer who, at the sentence level, is in a world all his own.” —Juan Vidal, NPR.org A writer of “startling talent” (The New York Times Book Review), Alejandro 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.
Download or read book Reforming Chile written by Patrick Barr-Melej and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2002-11-25 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the crucial yet largely overlooked role played by society's middle layers in the historical development of Latin America, Patrick Barr-Melej provides the first comprehensive analysis of the rise of Chile's middle-class reform movement and its profound impact on that country's cultural and political landscapes. He shows how a diverse collection of middle-class intellectuals, writers, politicians, educators, and bureaucrats forged a "progressive" nationalism and advanced an ambitious cultural-political project between the 1890s and 1940s. Together, reformers challenged the power of elite groups and sought to quell working-class revolutionary activism as they endeavored to democratize culture and fortify liberal democracy. Using sources that range from archival documents and newspapers to short stories, novels, and school textbooks, Barr-Melej examines the reform movement's cultural ideas and their political applications, especially as they were articulated in the areas of literature and public education. In the process, he provides a new framework for understanding Chile's cultural and political evolution, as well as the complicated place of the middle class in a society experiencing the swift changes inherent in capitalist modernization.
Download or read book Seeing Red written by Lina Meruane and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Meruane's prose has great literary force: it emerges from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the ungraspable, and from pain."—Roberto Bolaño 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.
Download or read book Humiliation written by Paulina Flores and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An uncompromisingly honest collection of short stories, examining with unique perspicacity the missteps, mistakes and misunderstandings that define our lives. Pride and disgrace. Nostalgia and revenge. Tenderness and seduction. From the dusty backstreets of Santiago and the sun-baked alleyways of impoverished fishing villages to the dark stairwells of urban apartment blocks, Paulina Flores paints an intimate picture of a world in which the shadow of humiliation, of delusion, seduction and sabotage, is never far away. This is a Chile we seldom see in fiction. With an exceptional eye for human fragility, with unfailing insight and extraordinary tenderness, Humiliation is a mesmerising collection from a rising star of South American literature, translated from the Spanish by Man Booker International Prize finalist Megan McDowell.
Download or read book Cowboy Graves Three Novellas written by Roberto Bolaño and published by Picador. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One more journey to the literary universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature Roberto Bolaño’s boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into enduring fiction is unmistakable in these three exhilarating novellas. In ‘Cowboy Graves’, Arturo Belano – Bolaño’s alter ego – returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. ‘French Comedy of Horrors’ takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen-year-old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in ‘Fatherland’, a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead. Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a master of contemporary fiction. These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño’s extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his great triumphs, while deepening our understanding of his profound gifts.
