In the title story, “Humiliation,” an out-of-work young father is forced to take his two young daughters with him to interviews and watches as the family of which he is unwittingly at the helm falls apart at the seams. In “Teresa,” a women’s casual flirting outside the library leads to a sinister conclusion (and Flores’ third-person narrator keeps us at a teasing distance from her strange heroine’s psyche so that we are left to chew over a multitude of possible meanings). “Talcahuano” is a sort of Chilean Stand By Me. In a poverty-stricken fishing town, four boys, whose fathers have all lost their jobs due to the downturn in the fishing trade, try to allay their boredom spending most of their lazy summer days hanging out on the porch eating watermelon and translating The Smiths lyrics into Spanish with stolen dictionaries. Until one of them has a devastating idea.
Paulina Flores was born in 1988 in Santiago, Chile. She spent her childhood in Conchalí and went to the Recoleta Humanities Academy for secondary studies. She then studied literature at the University of Chile and began teaching at a high school. She attended the literary workshops of Luis López-Aliaga and Alejandro Zambra.In 2011 she was awarded a grant from the National Fund ...