Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit (Translated by Daniel Hahn)
Author(s) from: Chile
Setting: Chile?
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2022
Description: A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit gets renewed attention in the English language in a novel of breakdowns. Holed up together, old, ill, and untethered from the revolutionary action that defined them, a couple's bonds dissolve in their loss of a child and their loss of belief in an idea. What is there left to have faith in when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation?

Chilco by Daniela Catrileo (Translated by Jacob Edelstein)
Author(s) from: Chile - Mapuche Origin
Setting: Chile?
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2023
Description: A near-future tale about love, life, and friendship in a world that’s falling apart. Chilco is the name of Pascale’s home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness, wetness, the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighbourhood, another raft of desperate refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet. When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping from the crushing weight of centuries of colonial repression that have eroded indigenous memories, language, and culture, or are they merely stepping into a twisted, lush new version of it? From her first days in this place where she’s supposed to feel safe and at home, Marina can’t avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her—there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past. In Chilco , Daniela Catrileo’s baroque, tropical jeremiad, the wounds of capitalism and empire inflict themselves on the person and on the land, but linger most devastatingly in language and memory. Indigenous Mapudungun and Quechua words, history, and cosmology form the chorus to this tropical fever dream of life, love, death, and friendship. Chilico examines Chile’s ongoing Indigenous oppression.
Other Books by the Author(s): Piñen (2026)

The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)
Author(s) from: Chile
Setting: Chile. 1984
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2016
Description: An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes. It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fern ndez's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fern ndez follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime. How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.
Other Books by the Author(s): Space Invaders (2013) Voyager: Constellations of Memory (2020)

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (Translated by Magda Bogin)
Author(s) from: Chile but has spent significant portions of her life living in Venezuela, Europe, and the U.S.
Setting: Chile
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1982
Description: The House of the Spirits, the unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future. One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.
Other Books by the Author(s): Portrait in Sepia (2000), Daughter of Fortune (1998), and many others.

By Night In Chile by Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Chris Andrews)
Author(s) from: Chile - has also lived in Mexico and spent a significant portion of his life living in Spain.
Setting: Chile
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2000
Description: As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel Roberto Bolano's first work available in English recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches," a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned after the destruction of Allende the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer."
Other Books by the Author(s): Savage Detectives (1998), 2666 (2004), and others.

My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel (Translated by Katherine Silver)
Author(s) from: Chile
Setting: Chile, 1986
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2001
Description: Centered 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. Pedro Lemebel's work focuses on the LGBTQIA+ community in Chile during the directorship.
Other Books by the Author(s): A Last Supper of Queer Apostles (2024)

I Dreamt the Snow was Burning by Antonio Skármeta (Translated by Malcolm Coad)
Author(s) from: Chile - had to leave Chile following the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.
Setting: Chile, 1973
Original Language: Spanish
Publised: 1975
Description: On 11 September 1973 General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende, bombing La Moneda, the presidential seat in Chile's capital Santiago where the President died resisting the attack. The National Football Stadium became a torture centre, where supporters of Allende's Popular Unity government were rounded up, tortured, and - like the popular singer Victor Jara - brutally killed. Chile's Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda also died in mysterious circumstances immediately following the coup. Thousands of Chileans disappeared, now known to have been murdered, and many others went into exile, including the writer Antonio Sk rmeta, who was completing his first novel I Dreamt the Snow was Burning, set in the weeks just before the coup, where football, Neruda's poetry, the growing tensions of the period clash around the inhabitants of a cheap Santiago boarding house, from petty crooks to fervent supporters of Popular Unity. Into their midst comes a football-mad country boy longing only to be a massive star - and of course to score with the girls. "Skármeta strikes a brilliant balance between realistic portrayals of daily life and stream-of-consciousness scenes... His ability to amplify emotional undercurrents and capture the raw poetry of everyday language is impressive. Journalist Malcolm Coad deserves praise for the lucidity and electrical vibrancy of his translation." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Other Books by the Author(s): A Distant Father (2010) , The Postman (Il Postino) (1985) , Watch Where the Wolf Is Going (1991) , The Names of the Things That Were There (2023) ,

Humiliation by Paulina Flores (Translated by Megan McDowell)
Author(s) from: Lived in Chile for about 33 years and then moved to Spain
Setting: Chile
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2015
Description: The nine mesmerizing stories in Humiliation, translated from the Spanish by Man Booker International Prize finalist Megan McDowell, present us with a Chile we seldom see in fiction: port cities marked by poverty and brimming with plans of rebellion; apartment buildings populated by dominant mothers and voyeuristic neighbors; library steps that lead students to literature, but also into encounters with other arts—those of seduction, self–delusion, sabotage. In these pages, a father walks through the scorching heat of Santiago’s streets with his two daughters in tow. Jobless and ashamed, he takes them into a stranger’s house, a place that will become the site of the greatest humiliation of his life. In an impoverished fishing town, four teenage boys try to allay their boredom during an endless summer by translating lyrics from the Smiths into Spanish using a stolen dictionary. Their dreams of fame and glory twist into a plan to steal musical instruments from a church, an obsession that prevents one of them from anticipating a devastating ending. Meanwhile a young woman goes home with a charismatic man after finding his daughter wandering lost in a public place. She soon discovers, like so many characters in this book, that fortuitous encounters can be deceptions in disguise. Themes of pride, shame, and disgrace—small and large, personal and public—tie the stories in this collection together. Humiliation becomes revelation as we watch Paulina Flores’s characters move from an age of innocence into a world of conflicting sensations.

The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso (Translated by Leonard Mades, Hardie St. Martin, and Megan McDowell)
Author(s) from: Lived most of his life in Chile though spent some time in self-imposed exile in Mexico, Spain, and the U.S.
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1970
Description: Deep in La Rinconada's maze of musty, forgotten hallways, Mudito rummages through piles of old newspapers. The mute caretaker of the crumbling former abbey, he is hounded by a coven of ancient witches who are bent on trans-forming him, bit by bit, into the terrifying imbunche: a twisted monster with all of its orifices sewn up, buried alive in its own body. Once, Mudito walked upright and spoke clearly; once he was the personal assistant to one of Chile's most powerful politicians, Jerónimo de Azcoitía. Once, he ruled over a palace of monsters, built to shield Jeronimo's deformed son from any concept of beauty. Once, he plotted with the wise woman Peta Ponce to bed Inés, Jerónimo's wife. Mudito was Humberto, Jerónimo was strong, Inés was beautiful--once upon a time ... Narrated in voices that shift and multiply, The Obscene Bird of Night frets the seams between master and slave, rich and poor, reality and nightmares, man and woman, self and other in a maniacal inquiry into the horrifying transformations that power can wreak on identity. Now, star translator Megan McDowell has revised and updated the classic translation, restoring nearly twenty pages of previously untranslated text that was mysteriously cut from the 1972 edition. Newly complete, with missing motifs restored, plots deepened, and characters more richly shaded, Donoso's pajarito (little bird), as he called it, returns to print to celebrate the centennial of its author's birth in full plumage, as brilliant as it is bizarre.
Other Books by the Author(s): Curfew (1986)

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra (Translated by Megan McDowell)
Author(s) from: Chile
Setting: Chile and New York
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2020
Description: 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.
Other Books by the Author(s): Bonsai (2006), The Private Lives of Trees (2007), and many others.

Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral by Gabriela Mistral (Translated by Randall Couch)
Author(s) from: Lived in Chile for around 33 years - spent 2 years living in Mexico and moved to the U.S. afterwards
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2008
Description: A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral’s most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning. From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting “madwomen” who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral’s poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral’s final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated “madwoman” than most have ever known.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda (Translated by W.S. Merwin)
Author(s) from: Chile - lived in Argentina for over 3 years
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1924
Other Books by the Author(s): Has multiple poetry collections

Sub Terra: Mining Scenes by Baldomero Lillo (Translated by Daniel Bernardo)
Author(s) from: Chile
Setting: Chile
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1904
Description: Sub Terra: Cuadros Mineros is the first work by the Chilean short-story writer Baldomero Lillo (1867-1923), published on July 12, 1904. In its first edition it was composed of eight stories, almost all of them set in the coal mines of Lota in the Province of Concepción. In the second edition, from 1917, other five stories were added, some of them with a different theme. The book describes from various angles and characters the way coal miners lived and died, particularly those in the Lota mines in southern Chile, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who worked from dawn to dusk in miserable conditions. It is basically a description of life in the mine, and the life of its workers; it is also a critique of the exploiting power, which reduced the human condition of the miners to simple beasts. Lillo was considered the master of the genre of social realism in his country.

The Movie Teller by Hernán Rivera Letelier (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
Author(s) from: Chile
Setting: Chile, 1960s
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2009
Description: María Margarita, a young woman who lives in a mining town in the heart of the Chilean Atacama desert in the 1960s, has had the gift of telling movies since she was a child. When a film starring Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper or Charlton Heston, or a Mexican feature packed with songs, arrives in the local village cinema, the exact change for a ticket is collected at María's house and she is sent to watch it. When María returns from the cinema, she tells the movie to her father, confined to a wheelchair, and to her four siblings, and soon she is telling the movie to a large and impatient public. Through this tender story, Hernán Rivera Letelier gives us the magical tale of village cinemas in their times of splendor - and of decadence.

The Movies of My Life: A Novel by Alberto Fuguet
Author(s) from: Born in Chile in 1963, he spent the first 13 years of his life in California before moving back to Chile.
Setting: California and Chile
Original Language: English
First Publised: 2003
Description: Thirty-something seismologist Beltrán Soler knows about earthquakes, but he doesn't quite grasp the notion that life, like the tectonic plate movement he studies, is in constant motion. One day he begins to remember the fifty most important movies of his life, ones he saw as a child and teenager growing up in California and Chile. As his mind ranges from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Beltrán reconnects with his past. Through his cinematic journey he ultimately comes to terms with his eccentric family's search for what makes the world physically shift around them -- and for the other, not so easy to measure, cultural shifts that throw us all off balance in different ways.
Other Books by the Author(s): Shorts: Stories (1975)

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories by Luis Sepúlveda (Translated by Peter Bush)
Author(s) from: Lived in Chile for at least 28 years before he was exiled (South and Central America as well as Germany)
Setting: Ecuadorean jungle
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1988
Description: The spellbinding classic tale of man and nature, honor, and adventure, in which the peaceful life of an aging, book-loving widower in the Ecuadorean jungle is upended when an ignorant tourist provokes a mother ocelot. Antonio José Bolivar Proaño lives quietly in a river town in the rain-soaked jungle of Ecuador that is slowly being overrun by tourists and opportunists. Having lost his wife decades earlier, he takes refuge in books--paperback novels of faraway places and bittersweet love, delivered to him by the dentist who visits the village twice a year. One day, a greedy trader pushes nature too far, setting an enraged mother ocelot on a bloody rampage through the village. The old man, a hunter who once lived among the Shuar Indians and knows the jungle better than anyone, is pressured by the village's detested mayor to join the expedition to kill the animal. Reluctantly. the old man is forced into the middle of a raging conflict between man and nature that will end in a powerfully climactic confrontation.

Seeing Red by Lina Meruane (Translated by Megan McDowell)
Author(s) from: Lived in Chile for about 30 years before moving to New York
Setting: New York
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2012
Description: 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.
Other Books by the Author(s): Nervous System (2018)

House of Mist by María Luisa Bombal
Author(s) from: Chile but has spent significant portions of her life living in Argentina, France, and the U.S.
Setting: Chile
Original Language: English
First Publised: 1935
Description: House of Mist stands as one of the first South American novels written in the style that was later called magical realism. Of this story of a young bride struggling with her marriage to an aloof landowner--and the mysteries surrounding their life together--in a house deep in the lush Chilean woods, Penelope Mesic wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Bombal showed "bold disregard for simple realism in favor of a heightened reality in which the external world reflects the internal truth of the characters' feeling . . . mingling . . . fantasy, memory and event."
Other Books by the Author(s): New Islands: And Other Stories (1939) and The Shrouded Woman