Diamela Eltit's literary work emerged on the Chilean cultural scene in the 1980s when the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) had consolidated its project of extermination, censorship, and neoliberal shock therapy. Forced to write in a suffocating atmosphere of restriction and violence, Eltit boldly cultivated a radical, insurrectional poetics aimed at questioning the very underpinnings of authoritarian power and discourse.
While Eltit's novels, published between 1983 and the present, provide a remarkable vision of Chile that has evolved over the past decades, she offers a different vantage point through her prolific and rigorous cultivation of literary essays.
Translated for the first time into English, this collection of Eltit's essays allows readers to delve into her key concerns as a writer and intellectual: the neoliberal marketplace; the marginalization of bodies in society; questions of gender and power; struggles for memory, truth, and justice after dictatorship; and the ever-complex relationships among politics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Diamela Eltit (1947) is a Chilean writer. From 1994 to 2017, she was full professor at Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana in Santiago, Chile and was granted an honorary doctorate by the same institution in 2023. Between 2007 and 2019, she was distinguished global professor at New York University. She has held visiting professorships as the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, Stanford University, and the University of Pittsburgh, among others. In 2015 she held the Simón Bolívar Chair at the University of Cambridge, England. In 2010 she received the José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize for her outstanding literary career. In 2018, she was granted the Andrés Sabella Prize by the city of Antofagasta, Chile; in 2020, the Carlos Fuentes Prize for Literary Creation (Mexico); and in 2021, the FIL Prize by the University of Guadalajara. Her literary work has been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, and Finnish. She has published twelve novels, three volumes of essays, and numerous journal articles. Her first novel, Lumpérica (1983), turned forty years old in 2023.