The Twilight Zone (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781644450475)

* Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature *

An engrossing, incantatory novel about the legacy of historical crimes by the author of Space Invaders

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fern疣dez's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fern疣dez follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.

How do crimes vanish in plain sight? How does one resist a repressive regime? And who gets to shape the truths we live by and take for granted? The Twilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.

Author: Nona Fern疣dez
ISBN-10: 164445047X
ISBN-13: 9781644450475
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Language: English
Published: 03/16/2021
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 7.40h x 5.00w x 0.70d
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2020 pg. 50
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2020
Library Journal 01/01/2021 pg. 68
Publishers Weekly 01/25/2021
Shelf Awareness 03/16/2021
Booklist 10/22/2021