Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature A dreamlike evocation of a generation that grew up in the shadow of a dictatorship in 1980s Chile Space 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 her 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 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.

Space Invaders: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Fernández, Nona

United States

Graywolf Press

* Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature * An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author ofSpace Invaders 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 Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novelThe Twilight Zoneis 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, Fernández 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.

The Twilight Zone: A Novel

A startling book-length essay, at once grand and intimate, from National Book Award finalist Nona Fernández.\nVoyager begins with Nona Fernández accompanying her elderly mother to the doctor to seek an explanation for her frequent falls and inability to remember what preceded them. As the author stares at the image of her mother’s brain scan, it occurs to her that the electrical signals shown on the screen resemble the night sky.\nInspired by the mission of the Voyager spacecrafts, Fernández begins a process of observation and documentation. She describes a recent trip to the remote Atacama desert―one of the world’s best spots for astronomical observation―to join people who, like her, hope to dispel the mythologized history of Chile’s new democracy. Weaving together the story of her mother’s illness with story of her country and of the cosmos itself, Fernández braids astronomy and astrology, neuroscience and memory, family history and national history into this brief but intensely imagined autobiographical essay. Scrutinizing the mechanisms of personal, civic, and stellar memory, she insists on preserving the truth of what we’ve seen and experienced, and finding ways to recover what people and countries often prefer to forget.\nIn Voyager, Fernández finds a new container for her profound and surreal reckonings with the past. One of the great chroniclers of our day, she has written a rich and resonant book.

Voyager: Constellations of Memory

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

La muerte de la madre en un accidente obliga a sus hijos a regresar al país de origen después de años de exilio para que sus cenizas descansen en las profundidades del río Mapocho. La Rucia deambula con su madre a cuestas por una ciudad apenas reconocible: son confusos los recuerdos de la infancia y demasiadas las preguntas que quedaron sin respuesta. Intenta reencontrarse con el Indio, su hermano, con una única coordenada: el trasero de una virgen que los condena a permanecer de un lado de la ciudad, a repetir siempre la misma historia de miseria y abandono. Una historia que se remonta a los días de la Conquista, de la colonia, de la dictadura pinochetista, en un espiral frenético de muerte, dolor e injusticia, como en un carrusel macabro sin sortija ni final. Nona Fernández Silanes, distinguida con el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, construye un relato trepidante que recupera los datos de la historia oficial, esa Historia con mayúscula, para masticarlos, digerirlos y devolverlos sin piedad a las aguas del río Mapocho. Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.

Mapocho (Narración en Castellano) (Spanish Edition)

Genre Fiction

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

La muerte de la madre en un accidente obliga a sus hijos a regresar al país de origen después de años de exilio para que sus cenizas descansen en las profundidades del río Mapocho. La Rucia deambula con su madre a cuestas por una ciudad apenas reconocible: son confusos los recuerdos de la infancia y demasiadas las preguntas que quedaron sin respuesta. Intenta reencontrarse con el Indio, su hermano, con una única coordenada: el trasero de una virgen que los condena a permanecer de un lado de la ciudad, a repetir siempre la misma historia de miseria y abandono. Una historia que se remonta a los días de la Conquista, de la colonia, de la dictadura pinochetista, en un espiral frenético de muerte, dolor e injusticia, como en un carrusel macabro sin sortija ni final. Nona Fernández Silanes, distinguida con el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, construye un relato trepidante que recupera los datos de la historia oficial, esa Historia con mayúscula, para masticarlos, digerirlos y devolverlos sin piedad a las aguas del río Mapocho.&nbsp; Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.

Mapocho (Spanish Edition)

«Si nos miramos en la memoria del Mapocho –dice Nona Fernández en el epílogo que cierra este volumen– veremos basura y mugre, cuerpos sin vida, pedazos de un relato cíclico que parece decirnos que todo es como siempre, y que vagamos condenados de un siempre a otro siempre. Creo que escribí este libro intentando romper ese hechizo. Recogiendo toda la mugre que encontré en el río, atendiéndola como se atiende un llamado de auxilio. Y es que el Mapocho está ahí, siempre lo ha estado, fluyendo en el patio de nuestra casa, morocho, mugriento y hediondo, intentando recordar algo nuestro que no sabemos o no queremos saber. Sobre ese algo quise escribir.» "Mapocho" se adentra en las regiones más oscuras del pasado de una ciudad, Santiago, y de todo un país, Chile, para relatar el destino de la protagonista, la magnética Rucia. Libro fundacional, de prosa envolvente, en él saltan a la vista todos los elementos que han situado a Nona Fernández entre las más relevantes narradoras contemporáneas.

Mapocho

Editorial Minuscula, S.L.U.

Space Invaders

En la lista de los mejores libros traducidos de los National Book Awards 2021 Las historias de La dimensión desconocida, dice la narradora, «siempre han estado pisándome los talones. Nací con ellas incorporadas en un álbum familiar que no elegí ni organicé».\nNovela galardonada con el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 2017.En plena dictadura chilena, un angustiado hombre llega a las oficinas de una revista de oposición. Es un agente de la policía secreta. Quiero hablar, dice, y una periodista prende su grabadora para escuchar un testimonio que abrirá las puertas de una dimensión hasta entonces desconocida.\nSiguiendo la hebra de esta escena real, Nona Fernández activa los mecanismos de la imaginación para acceder a aquellos rincones donde la memoria y los archivos no han podido llegar.\nConfrontando su propia experiencia con los relatos del hombre que torturaba, la narradora entra en las vidas de los protagonistas de ese testimonio ominoso: la de un padre que es detenido en una micro mientras lleva a sus hijos al colegio y la de un niño que cambia de nombres y de vidas hasta ser testigo de una masacre, entre otras.\nNona Fernández construye un relato a partir de la mala conciencia de un personaje insondable, exponiendo e iluminando esa zona de locura y extravío que está mucho más cerca de lo que pensamos y que puede hacer de un ser humano una bestia. Una novela que cautiva, conmueve y remece.\nENGLISH DESCRIPTION2021 National Book Awards Longlist for Translated LiteratureAn engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author of Space Invaders.\nWinner 
of the 2017 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize.\nIn the middle of the Chilean dictatorship, a distraught man goes into the offices of an opposition magazine. He's a secret police agent. I want to speak, he says, and a journalist turns on her tape recorder to listen to a testimony that will open the doors of an, until then, unknown dimension.\nFollowing the thread of this real-life event, Nona Fernandez activates her imagination to access those corners where memory and investigative files have not been able to reach.\nHaving to confront her own experiences with that of the torturer, the narrator enters the lives of the protagonists of that menacing testimony: that of a father detained in a bus while taking his children to school, and that of a child who must continue to change his name and make up different life stories until one day he witnesses a massacre, among others.\nNona Fernández builds a story based on the bad conscience of an unfathomable character, exposing and shining a light to that area of madness and loss that is much closer than we think, and that can turn a human being into a beast. A novel that captivates, moves you, and shakes you.

La dimensión desconocida / The Twilight Zone (MAPA DE LAS LENGUAS) (Spanish Edition)

Literatura Random House

Chilean Electric

El cielo (Spanish Edition)

Editorial Cuarto Propio

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