International Authors Book Club

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Program Type:

Book Club

Age Group:

Adults

Program Description

Event Details

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. April’s nation is Chile. We will meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore.

To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning authors. The bolded English translations are available through your Santa Fe Public Library as books or ebooks (Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby). Those titles and many more are available in Spanish as books or ebooks.

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Suggested authors:

Isabel Allende, author of Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia, The Japanese Lover and The House of the Spirits

Her maternal uncle was former Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was assassinated in 1973, which led to Isabel and her family fleeing the country. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, launched her career.

In 1988, Allende was awarded the Gabriela Mistral Order of Educational and Cultural Merit by former Chilean President Patricio Aylwin.

 

Roberto Bolaño, author of 2666, By Night in Chile and The Savage Detectives

The late novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist won the Romulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which features an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interacting in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared. He lived in Mexico after the Pinochet regime took over in Chile in 1973.

By Night in Chile focuses on a Jesuit priest who serves as a passive accomplice to the predatory and brutal methods of the Pinochet regime. This is the beginning of Bolano's indictment of the "intellectual man" who retreats into art, using aestheticism as a cloak and shield while the world lies around him, nauseatingly unchanged, perennially unjust and cruel. This book represents Bolaño's views upon returning to Chile and finding a haven for the consolidation of power structures and human rights violations. Other available titles include Amulet, The Insufferable Gaucho, Last Evenings on Earth and The Skating Rink. 

 

María Luisa Bombal, author of multiple works

Most of Bombal’s novellas and short stories were written and published in the 1930s. Her novellas The House of Mist and The Shrouded Woman, along with her lovely short stories, like New Islands, combine surrealism, memory, fantasy, and eroticism to explore the place of women in Chilean society in ways that align her with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, and Virginia Woolf.  Her only work available at SFPL is part of a two-volume anthology of Latin American authors in Spanish, Reflexiones: ensayos sobre escritoras hispanoamericanas contemporáneas.

 

Jose Donoso, author of Coronation, Hell Has No Limits, and The Obscene Bird of Night

Considered one of the leaders of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960-70s, he received the 1990 National Prize for Literature (Chile) several years before his death. His short story “Ana Maria” is available in The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories.

 

Ariel Dorfman, author of Darwin’s Ghosts and The Suicide Museum

Dorfman has been called one of the greatest living Latin American novelists, and his work has been compared to that of Pablo Neruda. He is a frequent contributor for The New York Times, the New York Review of Books Daily, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic Monthly. 

His play, Death and the Maiden, was adapted for the screen by Roman Polanski. His works appear in a several essay and story collections including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, How I Learned English and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.

 

Pedro Lemebel, author of My Tender Matador

The journalist, performance artist and novelist was one of Chile’s leading queer voices before his death. His most acclaimed work was My Tender Matador. His literary career began after Roberto Bolaño landed him a contract with his Spanish publisher.  A collection of his essays and newspaper columns are available in A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: selected essays. 

 
Gabriela Mistral, author of The Gabriela Mistral Reader

Mistral was a Chilean poet, diplomat and educator who became the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945 "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world.”  Her image is featured on the 5,000 Chilean peso banknote.

Works available at SFPL also include This America of Ours: the letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo and several Spanish-language children’s nonfiction books on her life and works. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.

 

Pablo Neruda, author and subject of multiple works

The late 1971 Nobel poet laureate was encouraged to write at an early age despite his father’s protests by eventual Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed his school. He published his first poem at age 13 under his birth name Neftalí Reyes in his hometown newspaper.

The prolific Neruda wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 100 Love Sonnets and The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems.  In 1974, his Memoirs appeared included a final segment describing the death of Salvador Allende during the storming of the Moneda Palace by General Pinochet and other generals. That occurred only 12 days before Neruda died of a heart attack, though rumors remain that he was poisoned.

 

Marcela Serrano, author of numerous works

Serrano is a novelist born in Santiago most known for her works set in the 20th century that deal with the worries, struggles, and ambitions of Latin-American women in a male-dominated society. Her most famous example is Ten Women (Diez Mujeres), which is available in Spanish along with four other novels and her contribution to Reflexiones.

Antonio Skármeta, author of The Dancer and The Thief

Skármeta gained international recognition for his 1985 novel Burning Patience, which later inspired the 1994 Academy Award-winning film Il Postino (The Postman). In later editions, the novel was retitled El cartero de Neruda (Neruda's Postman), which is available at SFPL in Spanish. His literary works, including The Dancer and the Thief, were translated into nearly 30 languages and have received numerous accolades. His short story “The Cyclist of San Cristóbal Hill” is available in The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories and another short story “Encomiastic arts of our national gamesmen” is available in The Global Game: Writers on Soccer.

 

Alejandro Zambra, author of Multiple Choice, The Private Lives of Trees and Ways of Going Home

A writer tells his stepdaughter a bedtime story called "The Private Lives of Trees" (same title as the novel), which he plans to end when the mother returns home from work. This novel appears to be somewhat autobiographical, as the man in the story also has finished a book about bonsai trees, referencing Zambra's award-winning debut novel Bonsái.

His 2013 novel Ways of Going Home is fictional but draws heavily on Zambra's childhood experiences under the Pinochet dictatorship. The novel switches between the memory of a nine-year-old boy growing up during a restrictive dictatorship and the life of the narrator who is writing the story, an example of meta-writing, or writing about writing.

 

Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder and Clean

Her debut novel The Remainder was critically acclaimed and won the 2014 Chilean Council for the Arts prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work. It has a foreword explaining its social and political significance by acclaimed Chilean author Lina Meruane.

Her latest, Clean, won the 2024 Prix Femina étranger for best foreign language work translated into French. It is written from the perspective of a family’s maid who is being interrogated after a young girl died. Trabucco Zerán, who had a Chilean father (Trabucco) and Palestinian mother (Zerán). is the first Latin American-born winner.