The Corset Tightening Chilean Literature: Jessy Chamorro-Salas’ Debut Narrative

Original article: El corsé que aprieta la literatura chilena

In Corset, her highly anticipated narrative debut, Jessy Chamorro-Salas presents a collection of stories written over several years, where the tensions of contemporary life—women’s issues, marginalization, everyday violence, and the despair pervading our times—are expressed through fragmentary, intense, and deeply human scenes.

This is a reissue featuring some new texts and an editorial proposal distinct from that of 2021, originally published by Sangría Editora.

The title, Corset, symbolizes the historical oppression endured by women, but also serves as a metaphor for the constraints imposed by today’s society: that tightening embrace which suffocates, organizes, and adjusts.

Through multiple voices, the stories depict characters caught between fears, obsessions, and realities that become too constricted, aiming to convey to the reader a profound, unsettling, and almost corporeal feeling.

The tales in this volume—ranging from couples meeting at Baquedano and fading in Dignidad, to women who mutate, replicate, disappear, or resist in changing bodies—create a feminist, urban, and proletarian narrative universe.

Are these distinct tales or a singular, collective murmur that traverses the streets, homes, and silences? Corset brings together a chorus of voices that, like a wandering moth between the pages, transform, return, illuminate, and burn.

The Author

Jessy Chamorro-Salas’s relationship with writing began at a young age. At thirteen, she discovered literature as a personal refuge, a space for catharsis to express a rich inner world.

Although she cannot recall the exact moment books became integral to her life, she acknowledges a deep attraction to language and its myriad possibilities since childhood; she read compulsively and even relished the handwriting tasks her father assigned, as they allowed her to read even more.

This early connection with words has stayed with her, making writing an essential part of her life. Among her literary affinities are classic authors—Borges, Cortázar, Bombal, Brontë—alongside contemporary Chilean and Latin American writers, whose works she studied and analyzed during her doctoral research.

For Jessy, current Chilean literature is challenging and diverse, with a publishing landscape that occasionally outpaces reader demand, yet remains attuned to urgent present-day issues. Her recommendations always highlight the importance of both established voices in the canon and new proposals emerging from marginalized spaces, territories, and experiences.

Queltehue Ediciones: Identity and Flight

Born from the desire to create something different and provocative, Queltehue Ediciones embraces an identity rooted in the local and seeks new literary perspectives. The queltehue—a common bird in Chile, protector of the harvest, and a symbol of alertness and freedom—inspires this editorial project that navigates between creation, resistance, and memory.

With the conviction that literature should be accessible to everyone, the imprint works to create spaces where new expressions can reach broader audiences.

The Citizen