North American Writers

NON FICTION. TENEMOS LAS MÁQUINAS, 2016. 82 PAGES.

In 1967, Ricardo Piglia was a young writer about to publish his first book of short stories but he was already creating a mode of reading and identifying a set of key texts that would define his future. These were the boom years of Julio Cortázar and the legacy of Borges, a time when one had to take a position with regard to their reading that would help them decide how and against whom to write. It was around this time that Piglia created his alter ego, Emilio Renzi, and started to have him sign his first texts.

That same year, he was commissioned by Jorge Álvarez to write a series of profiles of North American writers to accompany a selection of stories. They included Faulkner, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Capote. North American Writers also features the essay ‘North American Crime Stories', a text from 1968 that is key to understanding how Piglia read and the cross-overs and relationships he saw between literature and society.

In this book, Piglia practices a new form of essays about fiction, analyzing processes, narrators, and ways of rationing information, presenting a coherent reading of North American society. Does one have to live in the United States to know the country? No, it can be defined by its best writers, authors whose narrative styles sum up the fictions upon which the nightmare of the American dream is based.