Santiago Roncagliolo

Hi, This is Conchita: and Other Stories Santiago Roncagliolo

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize?winner and Granta ?Best Young Spanish- Language Novelist? Santiago Roncagliolo returns with his acclaimed translator Edith Grossman with a raucous phone sex novella and three dark, entrancing stories.

Told entirely in dialog, "Hi, This Is Conchita" is a virtuosic comic novella about men pushed past their breaking point?and the women who drive them crazy. Peru?s heir to the incisive social literature of Mario Vargas Llosa weaves a complex tale of an office worker hiring a hitman to kill his mistress, a man leaving feverish messages on his beloved?s answering machine, and a phone sex worker whose client is literally crazy about her.

The three stories that follow reveal Roncagliolo?s masterful range. ?Despoiler? is the claustrophobic tale of a Carnival in Barcelona that brings one middle-aged woman face-to-face to her childhood demons. ?Butterflies Fastened with Pins? is the perversely comic account of a man whose friends keep killing themselves. And ?The Passenger Beside You? is a surreal story narrated by a woman with a gaping bullet wound right through her heart.