Join Lily Meyer and the Castle Hill Center for the Arts (Truro, MA) online for a live, one-hour Zoom event, hosted by Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party. The interview will include time for questions from the audience. This event is free to attend, though donations to T.C.A. are appreciated! RSVP required.
Told in three distinct voices, Short War brings together a rapturous teenage love story set in Chile, the hunt for the author of an eye-opening literary detective story, and a complex reckoning with American political intervention in South America.
When sixteen-year-old Gabriel Lazris, an American in Santiago, Chile, meets Caro Ravest, something clicks. Caro, who is Chilean, is charming, curious, and deeply herself. Gabriel dreams of their future together. But everybody’s saying there’s going to be a coup—and no one says it louder than Gabriel’s dad, a Nixon-loving newspaper editor who Gabriel suspects is working with the C.I.A. Gabriel’s father is adamant that the moment political unrest erupts, their family is going home. To Gabriel, though, Chile is home.
Decades later, Gabriel’s American-raised adult daughter Nina heads to Buenos Aires in a last-ditch effort to save her dissertation. Quickly, though, she gets sidetracked: first by a sexy professor, then by a controversial book called Guerra Eterna. A document of war and an underground classic, Guerra Eterna transforms Nina’s sense of her family and identity, pushing her to confront the moral weight of being an American citizen in a hemisphere long dominated by U.S. power. But not until Short War’s coda do we get true insight into the divergent fortunes of Gabriel Lazris and Caro Ravest.
Shaped by the geopolitical forces that brought far-right dictators like Pinochet to power, their fates reverberate through generations, evoking thorny questions about power, privilege, and how to live with the guilt of the past.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. Her first novel, Short War, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum/A Strange Object in Spring 2024.
Lily holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Her short stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and more. Her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Karen Dukess is the author of The Last Book Party, "a spare, bittersweet page-turner (NYTimes)," which was an IndieNext and Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations Development Programme. She has blogged on raising boys for The Huffington Post and written book reviews for USA Today. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master's in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro.