SHORT WAR with Lily Meyer and Amanda Goldblatt
@ Pilsen Community Books
1102 W 18th St, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Wednesday, April 17th, from 7PM - 8PM
We’re excited to welcome Lily Meyer and Amanda Goldblatt to the store for an event in celebration of Lily Meyer’s new book Short War.
Told in three distinct voices, Short War brings together a rapturous teenage love story set in Chile, the hunt for the author of an eye-opening literary detective story, and a complex reckoning with American political intervention in South America.
When sixteen-year-old Gabriel Lazris–an American in Santiago, Chile–meets Caro Ravest, something clicks. Caro, who is Chilean, is charming, curious, and deeply herself. Gabriel dreams of their future together. But everybody’s saying there’s going to be a coup–and no one says it louder than Gabriel’s dad, a Nixon-loving newspaper editor who Gabriel suspects is working with the C.I.A. Gabriel’s father is adamant that the moment political unrest erupts, their family is going home. To Gabriel, though, Chile is home.
Decades later, Gabriel’s American-raised adult daughter Nina heads to Buenos Aires in a last-ditch effort to save her dissertation. Quickly, though, she gets sidetracked: first by a sexy professor, then by a controversial book called Guerra Eterna. A document of war and an underground classic, Guerra Eterna transforms Nina’s sense of her family and identity, pushing her to confront the moral weight of being an American citizen in a hemisphere long dominated by U.S. power. But not until Short War‘s coda do we get true insight into the divergent fortunes of Gabriel Lazris and Caro Ravest.
Shaped by the geopolitical forces that brought far-right dictators like Pinochet to power, their fates reverberate through generations, evoking thorny questions about power, privilege, and how to live with the guilt of the past.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird (Deep Vellum, 2021) and Ice for Martians (CUNY, 2022). She lives in Washington, D.C.
Amanda Goldblatt’s fiction and essays can be found at Guernica, Chicago Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She was a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and has worked with writers as a contingent instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, StoryStudio Chicago, and Northeastern Illinois University. Her debut, Hard Mouth — an adventure novel about grief — was published by Counterpoint in 2019.
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