Historical Fiction—Featured
Why Trujillo Still Matters
A statement of purpose: on the research behind this platform, the complexity of the Trujillo era, and why history is rarely as settled as we are taught to believe.
June 202615 min readRead Essay
The Archive
Essays & Notes
Reflections on historical fiction, political memory, archival research, and the craft of writing about the past.
Historical Fiction12 min read
Fiction and the Legitimization of History
Every historical narrative eventually seeks its fiction. On what novels do to the historical record — and what the word ajusticiamiento reveals about moral framing and the limits of the archive.
June 2026Read
Research Notes14 min read
What the Archive Refuses to Say
On the silences embedded in the official record — the documents that were never filed, the testimonies that were never taken, and the history that persists only in the body.
March 2024Read
On Writing11 min read
Metafiction as a Form of Mourning
When the historical novel turns inward and examines its own construction, it does not abandon truth — it pursues a deeper kind of honesty about what fiction can and cannot recover.
January 2024Read
The Novel9 min read
The Last Night: Origins of a Book
How a footnote in a Dominican history textbook became an obsession, and how that obsession became a novel about power, complicity, and the morning after a tyrant falls.
November 2023Read
Historical Fiction18 min read
Political Memory and the Caribbean Novel
A survey of how Caribbean writers — from García Márquez to Edwidge Danticat — have navigated the impossible task of fictionalizing state violence without aestheticizing it.
September 2023Read
Research Notes16 min read
The Dictator in the Room: Trujillo in Literature
From Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat to Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao — how writers have circled the figure of Trujillo without ever quite capturing him.
July 2023Read
On Writing12 min read
Writing Complicity Without Judgment
The hardest thing in historical fiction is not the villain — it is the ordinary person who looked away. How do you render complicity with empathy and without absolution?
May 2023Read