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If you enjoyed learning about some of the authors we have discussed here in this Padlet, please check out some of these recommendations!
- For Nettel's chilling story, watch "You" on Netflix!
- For Trías' story about love and abuse, enjoy "12 Essential Makeup Tips for the Aging Ghost," a social commentary and horror story written by Brousseau!
- For Vásquez, explore "In the Old Days" by Danticat, and "The Great Escape" by Wolitzer!
- For Comensal, try "His Father's Memories Are Not His Own" by Cotter, which further explores the connection between generations and memories.
- For Vento, try "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker!

If you're looking for even more recommendations, check out your local bookstore that features Hispanic voices in a variety of media! Some recommendations for Chapel Hill include:
- Epilogue Books and Chocolate Brews
- Flyleaf Books
- Golden Fig Books
- Letters Bookshop
- Regulator Bookshop
- Purple Crow Books
- And so much more!

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Learn more about our queer book club! And get tickets for April's meeting .

árbolito teas by epilogue

Our favorite house teas at your fingertips! Perfect for gifting, our hand-selected Fair Trade herbs, teas, and spices are blended in store and packaged in reusable tins they (or you!) can enjoy even after the tea is gone.

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Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews is an independent bookstore and Spanish-style chocolatería that aims to foster community in the heart of Chapel Hill. It is a place for people to gather, whether to cultivate new ideas, learn old ones, or escape into the welcoming atmosphere that books, chocolate, beer, and coffee all provide.

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“The Color of Balloons” follows a couple, Elena and Rogelio, as they travel to a gender reveal party.
Disaster ensues as Elena butts heads with her family members when they keep asking when her gender reveal will take place.
It is a beautiful story that takes a snapshot of Cuban culture while also pointing at the somewhat odd straight, white traditions that immigrant groups adopt after moving to the United States. It also speaks on pride and the importance of family.

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Dainerys Machado Vento (Havana, 1986) is a Cuban author.

In 2021, she was included in the special issue of Granta. The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists.

She holds a PhD in Literary, Cultural, and Linguistic Studies from the University of Miami, and a Master’s Degree in Hispanic American Literature from El Colegio de San Luis A.C., Mexico.

Her academic and journalistic articles have been published in various magazines such as Cuadernos Americanos, Hemisférica and Decimonónica, Revista Horizontum and La Gaceta de Cuba. Her awards include the 2016 State of San Luis Potosí Prize for Journalism.

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“56 (the Fall)” written by Sousa, is a short story about a lost lump sum of money that turns into a failed treasure hunt for the main character. Oscar receives his recently deceased uncle’s flat as inheritance.. Oscar remembers that his uncle Agustín withdrew all of his pension from the bank in recent years and believes it is in the apartment. While his country is in an economic crisis, Oscar becomes obsessed with finding the money hidden in the flat. He sells everything in the place and continues to gamble his money away in hopes of becoming rich. His health deteriorates while he searches for the money day in and out. He eventually dies as a result of lack of personal care and check in. The flat is left to his wife and her sister, who stumble across the money while cooking in the flat one day.

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Luciana Sousa was born in Buenos Aires Argentina in 1986. She studied communication and literature and works as a journalist in the media. She published her first novel “Luro” in 2016, which landed her on the “Best Young Writers in Bogota Under 39” in 2017. She uses aspects of realism to write her stories. Her second novel is called “Cuando nadie nos nombre”.

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In the text “The Waters of Zanjón” Lemebel reflects about his childhood in  Zanjón de la Aguada. He writes about what he witnessed and experiences living in a poor environment. Living in poverty was not an easy life but Lemebel wrote about his experience with humor to make the ugly truth enjoyable to read.

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Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia. In 2005, she moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina where she still resides. Her background is in journalism which heavily influences her writing process and she currently teaches creative writing classes. She is the author of two novels that are combinations of longer works and short stories. In her novels, she combines fiction and nonfiction to tell stories about growing up in Colombia in the 1990s. She is known for using dark humor and cynicism to discuss subject matters such as familial relationships, escapism, societal rejection, classism, and immigration.

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“Catechism” and “Broken Girls” focus on the theme of rebellion. The main character is a high school student tasked with differentiating between the abstinence doctrine that she is taught in her Catholic school and the social norms that are present in her peer group. She navigates friendship, feminism, and religion in order to form her own identity.

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"The Heart's Secret Moves" is the fictional story of Pedro, a young Mexican man who moonlights as a famous wrestler with the stage name of The Heart. By night, Pedro feels powerful and strong when he gains praise for defeating his opponents in the ring, but he returns to his disappointing daily life as a construction worker. When he sees a woman being raped by a policeman, he decides to embrace the power that being The Heart gave him as a wrestler: he killed the cop. Committing this righteous murder gave Pedro new perspective on life: he realized that justice is not doled out by the figures in power we are supposed to trust, and he resolves to take matters into his own hands. He also kills the corrupt site engineer on his construction site, and his girlfriend Marina's terrible father. At the end of the story, Pedro ironically meets justice when the police come to take him away: it seems that the justice system preys on those trying to set things right. Herrera's artfully crafted story reads like a superhero comic gone wrong: here, justice is no easy thing and the line between what's right and wrong is blurred beyond recognition.

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Yuri Herrera, born in 1970, is a contemporary Mexican author interested in the intersection of politics and literature. With a Bachelor's in Political Science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Texas, Herrera incorporates real life experiences and issues into his creative works which allows him to infuse them with meaning and relevance. He has written popular books translated into a variety of languages, all with common themes of fantasy, science fiction, Mexican culture and life, migration, and the physical and emotional border between the United States and Mexico.

His 2020 work "A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire" demonstrates Herrera's ability to craft an interplay between his fictional characters and their real-life political, economic, and social environments. In this work of historical fiction, Herrera details the tragedy of the El Bordo mine fire in 1920, which was wrongfully ruled the fault of the 100 miners who perished in the fire. By unpeeling the layers of corruption and negligence that permeated this tragedy, Herrera leaves the reader with an appreciation for a story woven into the fabric of real life. This theme is reflected in our reading for class, "The Heart's Secret Moves."

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“Masculinity” by Antonio Ortuño explores the role of men and the term masculinity in a sarcastic light. Ortuño reveals the irony behind statements relating to masculinity such as “you need to grow up, to act like men” or “manning up”. The first incident of this is between the narrator and his subordinates at work. The subordinates are messing with a soccer ball in the office and end up breaking the printer. To try to teach them a lesson, the narrator tells them to start acting like men and places a bet with one of them that he is sure he will win. When the narrator loses the bet, he expresses his anger by kicking the soccer ball, which breaks the printer. With his tail between his legs, the narrator goes to the ATM to retrieve money for the bet and to replace the coffee maker. On his way to the ATM, the narrator’s taxi driver warns him not to go alone at night. The narrator does not listen, thinking he is manly enough to go alone, and ends up getting attacked by a homeless person trying to get his money. The narrator has to be saved by the taxi driver and returns home to his wife who is waiting for him to take care of his child. There is irony around the narrator telling his subordinates to make good decisions and act more like men, for the narrator to end up acting the same way as them and not listening to an older man with more wisdom. Additionally, it is ironic that the traditional role of the man and woman is switched at the end of the narrative because after a long day at work, the narrator comes home to take care of his daughter while his wife sits on the couch watching television.

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“Petals” by Guadalupe Nettel is from her collection of short stories “Bezoar and Other Unsettling Short Stories.” In the story, an obsessive man roams his city, enjoying life until he starts running around the city in search of the woman of his dreams. He knows who she is– he can detect her from a distance, yet he does not know her name or face. In “Petals,” Guadalupe Nettel writes a story about obsessive attraction and stalking with a killer twist ending to probe readers about the role of the patriarchy in romantic relationships and the multifacetedness of people.

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Antonio Ortuño is an author and journalist from Guadalajara, Mexico. He writes both books and short stories that have been translated from Spanish into numerous other languages. He has received awards including best first novel for El buscador de cabezas, best young Spanish language writer, and GQ writer of the year in 2010.  In many of Ortuño’s works he writes about his childhood and personal experiences. For example, Die Verbrannten was about a massacre that Ortuño witnessed in his hometown. Another part of his childhood he regularly wrote about was La Bestia, or the train of death, which runs from Guatemala through Mexico towards the United States. This train is utilized by people trying to immigrate to the United States, but is dangerous in numerous ways, which Ortuño wrote about. Additionally, Ortuño has been praised for his humor, sarcasm, prose, and ability to explore contradictions through his writing.

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“Of Gods and Eels” is a short story written by Jorge Comensal that centers around blindness. It starts out with describing a father and a son as anxious and impatient, because of all the things they can’t see or control. The son studies blind swamp eels, noticing how interesting it is that these eels, with no defense mechanisms or eye sight, can exist. The father also studies, a bit rudely, the blind men in a public shower, wondering how they get around. He then gets in a tragic accident where he cracks his skull and loses sight in one of his eyes. This causes him to have to navigate his surroundings and for his son to have to navigate their relationship differently.

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In “I Never Heard the Birds Again,” Siosi "reflects on the potential curse of being born a beautiful girl in her community.” The story immerses the audience in traditional Wayúu culture. Siosi focuses on the reality of Wayúu women through social problems, such as child marriage and poverty. The narrator, a young woman in this matriarchal society, is forced into a marriage when she was a young teenager. She feels intense societal pressures to continue in the customary way of life for women, even if it strips her of her own identity. Throughout this moving narrative, the narrator truly reflects on how the society that raised her has beat her down and made her ugly inside.

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In “The Size of My Love” we follow the narrator Malena as she processes the repercussions of leaving her unstable and abusive partner Iván. We learn about her experiences in trying to take care of him, how she cyclically leaves him only to return later, and how prevalent he is even when he’s not in the picture. Malena has left him again and is staying at a hostel. She spends the last of her money, observes young girls around her, and has conflicted and intense feelings for a man staying at the hostel. At the end of the story, Malena stands as ash falls outside, reminding her of Iván standing in the snow.

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Jorge Comensal is a Mexican writer who was born in Mexico city in 1987. He has been featured in many publications

such as Letras Libres, Este País, Revista de la Universidad de México, VICE, The Literary Review, and The Paris Review. He has written several books, his most popular being Las mutaciones, which tells the story of the struggles a cancer patient goes through as well a the struggles of significant people in his life. He has also written Este vacío que hierve (This Emptiness that Boils), Yonquis de las letras (Letter Junkies), and La conquista en el presente (The Present Conquest).

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Fernanda Trías is an Uruguayan author born in 1976. She is one of the most contemporary authors and translators in our course and has had unique experiences growing up under a military dictatorship infamous for its torture. Influenced by these experiences, Trías writes about visceral ideas that occupy her thoughts until she writes them out. Her writing is steeped in Uruguayan literary tradition with its own “non sterile” twist. She has authored short story collections, novellas, and dystopian novels, including Mugre Rosa (Filthy Rose) and The Rooftop as some of her most acclaimed work.

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Pedro Lemebel was a Chilean writer, artist, and activist. Lemebel was born on November 12, 1952, and died on January 23, 2015, due to cancer. Lemebel was born and grew up in the poorest neighborhood of Santiago, Chile. In his work, Lemebel explores deep, dark, and taboo subjects and humanizes them; this can be witnessed in his work “The Waters of Zanjón.” In the 1980s, Lemebel went against the social norms and took his mother’s last name (Lemebel).

During the political conflicts in Chile under Pinochet, Lemebel was politically identified as a communist and co-founded the group “The Mares of the Apocalypse.” The group did interventions during political and cultural events and would draw attention to queer people, people with aids, sex workers, and other individuals society does not care for. During some interventions, “The Mares of the Apocalypse” would dance the Cueca on broken glass and dress up as Frida Kahlo. Lemebel would also be dressed in heels and clothing that would not go unnoticed in order to challenge and criticize society and the government, as a form of self-expression.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez (born in Bogotá on January 1, 1973) is a Colombian writer, journalist, and translator. Regarded as one of the most important Latin American novelists working today, he is the author of seven novels, two volumes of stories, two books of literary essays, and numerous articles of political commentary. His novel The Sound of Things Falling, published in Spanish in 2011, won the Alfaguara Novel Prize and the 2014 International Dublin Literary Award, among other prizes. His novels have been published in 28 languages. In 2012, after living in Europe for sixteen years, in Paris, the Belgian Ardennes, and Barcelona, Vásquez moved with his family back to Bogotá.

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Guadalupe Nettel is a contemporary Mexican author who immigrated to and was raised in France. Diagnosed with Peter’s Syndrome, she was bullied as a child and thus used literature as a creative outlet. Nettel went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the  École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. ​As an author, Nettel has international acclaim. She primarily writes novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into 17+ languages. General themes in Nettel’s work are reflection of self​, building identity​, isolation, and love in all its forms. As a result, Nettel’s readers often question what makes us who we are. How is our relationship with ourselves and how does that impact our relationship with others?

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Vicenta Siosi is an indigenous Latin American author most famous for the short story, "I Never Heard the Birds Again" and her books “Cerezas en Verano” and “Esa horrible costumbre de alejarme de ti” She was born in 1965 in Riohacha, Guajira, a city in northern Colombia, as a part of the native Wayúu people. With an education in social communication and journalism, she went on to work as an educator in Latin American schools. She also explored screenwriting and documentary filmmaking alongside writing short stories. Her work represents the Wayúu culture stemming from her personal experience as a woman in this community. Her stories often address the reality of Wayúu women through social problems, such as child marriage and poverty. She speaks on the violation of the rights of girls and women, as well as the violation of rights by the Colombian government.