Author(s): Nona Fernandez

Short Stories | Translated fiction

'The Twilight Zone is wildly innovative, a major contributionto literature.' - The New York Times Book Review It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of thesecret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter,who records his testimony. Our narrator is a child when she first sees thisman's face on the magazine's cover with the words 'I Tortured People', andhis complicity in the worst crimes of the regime haunt her into adulthood. Through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernndez follows 'the manwho tortured people' to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilightzone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarinand the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yetcommonplace 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? TheTwilight Zone pulls us into the dark portals of the past, reminding us that thework of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply thatthese absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.