Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

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In 1966, the twenty-three-year-old Argentinian writer Liliana Heker won the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize with a collection of short stories, Los que vieron la zarza (Those who saw the burning bush). The book was published in Buenos Aires, in July of that same year, by Jorge Alvarez, an editor whose keen eye had led him to discover such future luminaries as Manuel Puig and Rodolfo Walsh. A few days earlier, in June, the weak democratic government of President Arturo Illia had been overturned by a military coup led by General Juan Carlos Onganía. Onganía was an antiliberal ultraconservative who quickly dismantled the workers’ unions and tried to place the universities under his own authority. The attack on professors and students, effected less than a month after the coup, came to be known as the “Night of the Long Sticks” because of the brutality of the assault. Paradoxically, this repression sparked a vigorous opposition to the government which would, years later, force the military leaders to call for democratic elections.

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