Peru

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Grave Goods

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Renowned writer, philologist, and critic Miguel Garcia Posada says of this book: “It’s not a stretch to consider it one of the most notable revelations of recent Latin American literature.”

This is not a book of gore. Rather, the majority of these stories are creepy with touches of humor and twists at the end that will make you gasp or laugh in surprise and shock. It takes true talent to convey a solid micro-story and these are incredibly rich and well written for all their brevity. The author leaves much to the imagination which somehow adds more to the story and ups the creep factor.

A slim book, Grave Goods contains 98 pieces of flash fiction from one of Peru's best contemporary writers. While Fernando Iwasaki's stories—like all good horror stories—are intended to disconcert his readers, they are also often humorous in nature. Some re-create or re-envision urban legends, some come from dreams, and some are pure inventions of Iwasaki's remarkable mind.

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The King is Always above the People

Longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction

An urgent, essential collection of stories about Latin American families, immigration, broken dreams, LA gang members, and other tales of high stakes journeys

Betrayal. Family secrets. Doomed love. Uncertain futures. Migration. In Daniel Alarcón’s hands, these are transformed into deeply human stories with high stakes. In "The Thousands," people are on the move and forging new paths; hope and heartbreak abound. A man deals with the fallout of his blind relatives' mysterious deaths and his father's mental breakdown and incarceration in "The Bridge." A gang member discovers a way to forgiveness and redemption through the haze of violence and trauma in “The Ballad of Rocky Rontal.” And in the tour de force novella, "The Auroras", a man severs himself from his old life and seeks to make a new one in a new city, only to find himself seduced and controlled by a powerful woman. Richly drawn, full of unforgettable characters, The King is Always Above the People reveals experiences both unsettling and unknown, and yet eerily familiar in this new world.

“Alarcón is an empathic observer of the isolated human, whether isolated by emigration or ambition, blindness or loneliness, poverty or war. His stories have a reporter's mix of kindness and detachment, and his endings land like a punch in the gut. His purpose isn't to approve or condemn, or to liberate. He's writing to show us other people's lives, and in every case, it's a pleasure to be shown.” —NPR

"Showcases his talent as a master storyteller. In 10 vivid, captivating stories, Alarcón explores family relationships, secrets, betrayal, hope, love, heartbreak, immigration, forgiveness, and redemption." —Buzzfeed

“Dynamic novelist and journalist Alarcón delivers a collection of loosely affiliated short stories, each buzzing and alive…Alarcón’s gift for generating real, tangible characters propels readers through his recognizable yet half-real worlds.” —Booklist

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Death in the Andes

Written by the 2010 Nobel Prize winning author & “Peru's best novelist—one of the world's best.” —The New Yorker

In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomás have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tomás entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.

Death in the Andes is an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world's great novelists.

“Remarkable . . . a fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and llamas, snowy peaks, hunger, and violence.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there . . . merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal.” —Time

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

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Blood of the Dawn

Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as “the time of fear” in Peruvian history when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in lucid, brutal prose.

The stories of the three women converge at the end, in a series of horrifically violent passages—they're as different from one another as can be, but they end up sharing the same experience. It's as upsetting as you could possibly imagine.

“Blood of the Dawn is a short novel, and maybe that's why it's so effective. Salazar Jiménez and translator Elizabeth Bryer make every word count, and the result is a work of concentrated intensity with no room for the reader to escape the horrors that fill just about every page. It's a novel that never lets the reader blink, until the terrifying last words … The violence that permeated Peru in the 1980s and 1990s is unspeakable, which is exactly why it needs to be spoken. That's what Jiménez does in this beautiful, horrifying work of art.” —NPR

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Blue Hour

Adrián Ormache, a high-flying lawyer with a beautiful wife and two daughters, leads a privileged and glamorous life in one of Lima’s wealthiest neighborhoods. But when his mother dies, he discovers a letter amongst her possessions making shocking claims about her now long-dead husband, Adrián’s father—a commander in the army during the Peruvian Civil War of the 1980s. As well as being linked to atrocities committed against the ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas, it appears that he also kidnapped and kept a local girl, whose family now seeks retribution.

Shocked out of his comfortable existence, Adrián becomes obsessed with finding the girl and sets out to face the harrowing realities of Peru’s recent past, and uncover the truth about his father.

“The strength of the plot pivots on the lovers’ ambiguous feelings for one another—the intensity of their mismatched love and hatred is perfectly drawn.” —Times Literary Supplement

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Sexographies

In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the city in the company of prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives. Sexographies is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.

“The most striking quality of Sexographies is Wiener’s fearlessness―her ability to broach any topic without the slightest flinch, however unfamiliar or achingly personal…. her essays do not deal solely in sex, as the title of the collection may suggest, but in the exploration of identity and gender. How are we to make sense of our own bodies and the bodies of others? Why is it that we with the internet at our fingertips supposedly know more than ever, yet often experience less and are less open to the experiences of others? Wiener urges us to ask these questions in order to uncover the artificial boundaries that have confined us to our own experiences. Nothing is off limits to Gabriela Wiener and she spares her readers no detail of her adventures. The result is Sexographies―an addictive and darkly funny collection that surprises at every turn.” —The Arkansas International

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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The Word of the Speechless

The Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro is one of the masters of the short story and a major contributor to the great flourishing of Latin American literature that followed the Second World War. In a letter to an editor, Ribeyro said about his stories, “in most of [them] those who are deprived of words in life find expression—the marginalized, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice. I have restored to them the breath they’ve been denied, and I’ve allowed them to modulate their own longings, outbursts, and distress.”

This is work of deep humanity, imbued with a disorienting lyricism that is Ribeyro’s alone. The Word of the Speechless, edited and translated by Katherine Silver, introduces readers to an indispensable and unforgettable voice of Latin American fiction.

“A magnificent storyteller, one of the best of Latin America and probably of the Spanish language, unjustly not recognized as such.” —Mario Vargas Llosa

(Group read suggestion from Ivor Watkins, book club moderator.)

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