Santiago Roncagliolo

Diario de la pandemia

Santiago Roncagliolo

Entre el 28 de marzo -días después de que la OMS declarara al nuevo coronavirus y al covid-19 (la enfermedad derivada de aquél) como una pandemia- y el 30 de junio de 2020, la Revista de la Universidad de México convocó a más de 100 escritoras y escritores, de entre los más relevantes de la actualidad, a relatar sus experiencias en medio de un contexto mundial inédito, marcado por el temor y la zozobra, pero también por la esperanza y la empatía. El resultado es un testimonio polifónico que, desde diversos puntos del orbe, da cuenta del día a día en medio del aislamiento, la incertidumbre y el dolor.

Hi, This Is Conchita

Santiago Roncagliolo

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize–winner and Granta “Best Young Spanish- Language Novelist” Santiago Roncagliolo returns with his acclaimed translator Edith Grossman with a raucous phone sex novella and three dark, entrancing stories. Told entirely in dialog, «Hi, This Is Conchita» is a virtuosic comic novella about men pushed past their breaking point—and the women who drive them crazy. Peru’s heir to the incisive social literature of Mario Vargas Llosa weaves a complex tale of an office worker hiring a hitman to kill his mistress, a man leaving feverish messages on his beloved’s answering machine, and a phone sex worker whose client is literally crazy about her. The three stories that follow reveal Roncagliolo’s masterful range. “Despoiler” is the claustrophobic tale of a Carnival in Barcelona that brings one middle-aged woman face-to-face to her childhood demons. “Butterflies Fastened with Pins” is the perversely comic account of a man whose friends keep killing themselves. And “The Passenger Beside You” is a surreal story narrated by a woman with a gaping bullet wound right through her heart.