A History of Chile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) chronicles the political history of Chile during the second half of the 20th century. Sara Wheeler's Travels in a Thin Country (Modern Library, 1999) is the story of an Englishwoman's trip to Chile, but it can be frustratingly superficial. A better read is Chile: A Traveler's Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2003), translated by Katherine Silver, which provides readers with a well-rounded collection of regionally based memoirs penned by Chile's best contemporary writers, and arranged geographically so that readers may "travel" through the country's diverse landscapes.
Popular titles by Chile's top literary artists Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and Isabel Allende have been translated into English. Neruda's masterful Canto General (Debolsillo, 2004) and The Heights of Macchu Picchu (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1967) will make a poetry lover out of anyone. Mistral's extraordinary poetry can be found in Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of New Mexico Press, 2003), in Spanish and English, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin; Mistral's story has been brought to life for children in the new book My Name is Gabriela by Monica Brown and John Parra (Luna Rising, 2005). Isabel Allende is Chile's most famous contemporary writer, well known for such works as the love-it-or-hate-it The House of the Spirits (Bantam, 1986), Eva Luna (Bantam, 1989), and more recently, her memoirs of the country she was forced to leave in exile in My Invented Country (Harper Perennial, 2004).
While not specifically set in Chile, Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman's lauded play Death and the Maiden (Penguin, 1994) deals with the aftermath of an era of torture and "disappearings." Other works that debate the Allende years and the Pinochet dictatorship that, depending on whom you talk to, are either accurate or dishonest, are ex-Allende translator Marc Cooper's memoirs in Pinochet and Me (Verso, 2002); Roger Burbach's The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice (Zed Books, 2004), a scholarly yet lucid account of Allende and Pinochet, with more sympathies for the former than the latter; and Thomas Hauser's The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), which was adapted for the 1982 film Missing.
