The Library
An annotated list of books that have shaped this project — essential reading on the Trujillo era, historical fiction, Caribbean literature, and the theory of memory and the archive.
Essential reads are marked
Essential histories and accounts of the Trujillo dictatorship and its aftermath.
The single most important scholarly work on the cultural and political logic of Trujillismo.
A revisionist account of how Trujillo built genuine popular support among the peasantry through land reform —…
The novel that opened the Trujillo era to English-language readers.
The fukú — the curse — of Trujillo's shadow over generations of Dominican families.
Vargas Llosa's account of the assassination and its aftermath.
Not specifically about the Dominican Republic, but essential for understanding how power shapes historical memory.
Novels and essays that have shaped my thinking about what historical fiction can and cannot do.
The greatest historical novel of the past fifty years.
The novel that proved historical fiction could be both politically necessary and formally radical.
Not a historical novel in any conventional sense, but the most profound meditation I know on the relationship…
Sebald's masterpiece.
García Márquez's account of Bolívar's final journey.
A formally audacious novel that uses the polyphony of voices to approach grief and history sideways.
Theoretical and critical works on how societies remember violence and how archives shape — and distort — the historical record.
Dense but essential.
The foundational text on social memory.
A clinical account of trauma that has profound implications for how we understand testimony, silence, and the limits of narrative.
Levi's final book, written forty years after Auschwitz.
Writers from the Caribbean whose work has shaped my sense of what this literature can do.
Danticat's first novel, about a Haitian woman navigating trauma across generations.
A memoir about family, immigration, and the violence of borders.
Carpentier's account of the Haitian Revolution and the lo real maravilloso.
"Hay un país en el mundo" — there is a country in the world.
Novels and essays that make their own construction visible — works that refuse to pretend the writer was not there.
The book that solved a problem I did not yet know how to name.
A novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich that interrupts itself constantly to confess its own doub…
Not metafiction in the strict sense, but a novel that makes the unreliability of memory its entire architecture.
The foundational text of postmodern metafiction in the Latin tradition.
The original intrusive critic.
This list is personal and partial. It reflects the books that have most directly shaped my thinking about this project — not a comprehensive bibliography of the field. For the full scholarly apparatus, see the Research Notes.