Calbuco, a title that takes up the name of the small island in southern Chile where the author grew up, is an epistolary novel composed of letters that Romina Pistolas addresses to figures from her past and present, people who have marked her life and whose memory returns to question her. In these intertwined voices, a portrait emerges of a town where patriarchy and gender abuse predominate, but where networks of solidarity are also forged between women who resist and accompany each other.
The work reflects on memory, sisterhood and the traumas inherited from generation to generation, while portraying the experiences of the province and the ways of inhabiting deep Chile. With an agile and beautiful prose, Romina Pistolas weaves communicating vessels between the intimate and the collective, between the written life and the lived life, confirming the strength of an author who bursts forth with a clear and singular voice.

Rominas Pistolas is from Chile, her family hails from Calbuco, but she moved to Australia where she worked for several years as a stripper. She published a book and became a sensation. Amidst the changes brought about by laying her life bare through fiction, she began writing a blog – a sort of personal diary she hadn’t intended to publish. But she did.
This time, Romina holds nothing back. She is no longer her literary alter ego. With the same sense of humour and a refreshing yet incisive style, she recounts her sexual encounters and misunderstandings, and her story of love and heartbreak with Pololo and Jota, two very different gringos who share Romina’s heart. Through witty reflections and moments of genuine emotion, My Year of Sex and Relaxation (“Mi año de sexo y relajación”) is an intimate, honest and courageous portrait of a woman in the midst of a journey of self-discovery.

“My first day as a stripper wasn’t much different from the first day of school. On both occasions, I pretended to be braver than I really was.” This is the existential gamble of Romina, the protagonist of this story: to act with a courage that isn’t there until it is obtained.
Carmen, or How I Got into the Industry of Dancing Naked (»Carmen. O cómo me inicié en el negocio de bailar sin ropa«) is a novel about daring, in spite of fear. The fear of leaving home, the familiar, the safe, the solid ground. And yet, having the courage to step through the door into the unknown; traveling to the other side of the world to start over, discovering friends where they weren’t expected. The courage to dive into the water, fully clothed, to reach the other shore, to get, somehow, to the other side.
With a fresh voice, agile prose, and a lot of humour, through this autofiction, Romina Pistolas tells us in the first person of an experience rarely seen in literature: how she started in the business of dancing without clothes.