Cars on fire: stories

"When you live in an adopted country, when you're an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death." A series of female characters--the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student--have identities which are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile's La Zona Central, these stories offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces-xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world-that shape life in Chile and the United States"--