A fierce, tender collection of stories about the lives, traumas, and dreams of Mapuche youth in modern-day Chile.Jesus, Valeska, Yajaira, and Ale are some of the vivid characters that inhabit the stories told in Pinen , a book that casts an unflinching gaze on the stark margins of urban life. Within its pages unfold the bullet-ridden death of a big shot from the blocks; the fraught, often violated sexuality of women in a displaced community; the unwavering bond between two friends navigating the waria ; the toxicity that seeps through youth and the distances that inevitably come with growing up; and, finally, a fierce declaration of love to the clandestine spirit of a brother. These are young lives that drift through the many peripheries of the city carrying a hope as immense as the injustice that defines their days.The stories that make up Pinen invite the reader into an intimate, often overlooked space - those small, enclosed rooms where the everyday tragedies of the many silently unfold. With brutal realism and lyrical restraint, Daniela Catrileo renders these acts of courage and violence with masterful precision, granting voice and presence to those rarely seen in literature.

About the Author

Daniela Catrileo is an award-winning Mapuche writer from Santiago de Chile. Her debut novel Chilco received a PEN Translates Award and was prize-winning in Chile. Pinen is her first collection of short stories to be published in English.

Jacob Edelstein is a translator from the South Bay of Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Latin American Literature Today , The Southern Review and The Columbia Review . His translation of Patrimonio by Santiago Arau was published in 2023.

Reviews

"Catrileo sketches out a poetic and political map... of Andean territory." -La Nacion

"A beautiful, merciless book that offers a glimpse into the old wound of belonging and exclusion, approached with a rarely explored rawness." -Alia Trabucco Zeran , author of THE REMAINDER

"Pinen is a profound and harsh book, a narrative that at times strikes like a whip, yet threaded with moments of strange and haunting beauty." -Selva Almada , author of NOT A RIVER

"'Pinen' refers to the grime that forms on skin when sweat mixes with the dust of the earth. In Chile, this Mapuche word also carries connotations of poverty. Through this lens, Daniela Catrileo offers a powerful perspective-linking two enduring sites of violence and disgrace in the country: marginalization as a geopolitical strategy of control, and the postcolonial repression still enacted by the state." -El Desconcierto

"A gripping tale of the heirs of the Mapuche diaspora. Catrileo is a dazzling new voice." -Bestia Lectora

"Memory, identity, and diaspora are at the heart of this author's work-a sharp critique of her country's reality." -Coolt

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Praise for Daniela Catrileo

Cercador Prize (Finalist)
English PEN Translates Award

"A blistering exploration of difference and belonging." -The Skinny

"Chilco is one of the most thrilling and urgent novels I've read this year - a searing portrait of Indigenous resilience and radical imagination." -Morning Star

"Daniela's writing scoops you up and takes you on a lush, haunting journey through grief, identity, and colonial scars." -SERVICE95

"[E]ach chapter is a miniature mosaic... Chilco is a spellbinding fever-dream, swirling with socio-political conversations, mysteries, and self-reclamations... Daniela Catrileo and Jacob Edelstein may have just offered the literary canon an end-of-the-world, post-capitalism, post-empire survival manual it did not necessarily expect but so desperately needs." -Southern Review of Books

"[C]omplex, lyrical and poetic... Catrileo accomplishes so much in fewer than 300 pages...Edelstein's translation handles this language play well... The prose alone makes it a must-read." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"If the imposition of new ecologies was integral to the European colonization of the Americas, any process of resistance and decolonization must be ecological, too. It's in poetry and fiction that the imagination for such a thing could take root-and Catrileo understands this well. Chilco's imagistic and documentary structure, its radical mixture of poetry and fiction, is held together by the novel's emphasis on the ecology of the island...For her and her characters, it's not the future that flashes tantalizingly on the horizon, but the possibility of truly going home." -The New Republic

"[I]mpressive...Catrileo keeps the novel afloat with razor-sharp observations on the city's exploitive colonial history and staggering decay. It's a rewarding story of chosen family." -Publishers Weekly

"Chilco is moving, keen, and disruptive; a beautiful novel about origin, identity, love, and the land we belong to." -Monica Ojeda , author of JAWBONE

"A song to the resistance of urban indigenous diasporas who continue to imagine the possibility of return." -Gabriela Wiener , author of SEXOGRAPHIES and NINE MOONS

"A book of fascinating imagination that invites us to open the windows, at this precise moment, to seek out the distant signs of hope." -Marco Aviles , author of I AM NOT YOUR CHOLO

"These pages pulse with grief, but also with a burning desire to confront the wounds of colonialism and reclaim both language and territory." -Liliana Colanzi , author of YOU GLOW IN THE DARK

"A novel that interrogates roots, identity and territory in the deepest sense." -La Tercera

"Chilco weaves together decolonized territories, both in language and in social and emotional relations - and even among the bodily senses." -Reforma

"A beautiful yet harsh political novel that depicts diversity through a baroque and expressive language." -Pagina/12

"Powerful... an invitation towards new ways of reading what is happening and what is being written in the continent." -El Pais

"Catrileo sketches out a poetic and political map... of Andean territory." -La Nacion

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Book Information
ISBN 9781917260381
Author Daniela Catrileo
Format Paperback
Page Count 152
Imprint Charco Press
Publisher Charco Press