In the tradition of Haruki Murakami and Leonora Carrington, an exuberantly imagined debut that explores ordinary worlds marked by unusual phenomena.

An artist who makes miniatures of dead people agrees to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to a city where she is haunted by the past and a pair of pet lobsters. Two teenagers escape a hippie cult during the final days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Another couple of teenagers, this time hipsters with rabbit teeth, take a road trip through the north of Chile looking for a bag containing something valuable and apparently also dangerous. A melancholic and volatile ghostwriter lost in New York, days after hurricane Katrina, who investigates the lives of suicidal U.S. college students. And in the story that closes the volume—in which mannequins and humans coexist in a future of extreme authoritarianism, where the question of who gets to be human is opened for discussion.

“A study on the strangeness of human life. ADO puts a dystopia in front of us; thus, we have the task of facing our own alienation.”

The first story in the collection, “Mrs. Gonçalves and the Lives of Others” encompasses, in its own way, all of the themes that permeate the collection. Observing the intricate details of the lives of others, the reader will feel like Mrs. Gonçalves, who, after hours of spying on her neighbors, realizes that all she has to do is watch and wait, “and then, voila, inevitably that moment comes when people reveal their true selves. That moment of transparency when we are not aware of anyone else, when we free ourselves from the gaze of others, when we let our guard down and show ourselves as we really are.”

In these stories, some of which can be read as novellas or ‘atomized novels’, there are fantastic, dreamlike elements and a calculated ambiguity that shifts between the absurd and the realistic. Brilliantly conceived and strikingly original, this collection takes the reader on a journey around Santiago de Chile, Washington DC, New York, and even into the future. ADO’s writing investigates all that is strange and hidden in the everyday, unfolds new deliriously comic aesthetics to explore Latin America’s eerie and weird realities.

National Book Award for Best Story Collection of the Year

Originally published in Chile as two separate books:
La experiencia formativa (2016) and La experiencia deformativa (2020)

Other Editions: Las Experiencias (2021) / Gente un poco dañada (2024)

Publisher: Neón Ediciones (Chile) / Suburbano (U.S. Spanish edition) / PesoPluma (Perú) / El Cuervo (Bolivia) / Upcoming (Mexico)/ Upcoming (Spain)

Antonio Díaz Oliva (ADO) is a Chilean writer living in Chicago, where he works as editor and translator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). He is the author of the novel La soga de los muertos (Alfaguara – Penguin Random House) and a short story collection published in Chile, Peru and the U.S. He’s also the editor of Estados Hispanos de América: Nueva Narrativa Latinoamericana Made in USA, in which he brings together authors who write in Spanish and live in the United States, such as Valeria Luiselli, Rodrigo Hasbún, Liliana Colanzi, Fernanda Trías, Yuri Herrera, among others. In 2010 he received the Roberto Bolaño Young Writers Award and in 2017 the National Book Award for Best Story Collection. He was also chosen by FIL-Guadalajara as one of the most outstanding Latin American writers born during the 80s. His journalism and essays have been published in Asymptote, Rolling Stone, Latin American Literature Today, Gatopardo, Letras Libre and El Malpensante. His latest book is a campus novel called Campus, which was published by Chatos Inhumanos, a bilingual publishing house based in New York that publishes contemporary Latinx and Hispanic authors. 

 www.antoniodiazoliva.com / @TheAntonioAdo

For rights information, contact the author: antoniodiazoliva@gmail.com