Lo que está y no se usa nos fulminará
Patricio Pron

SHORT STORIES | 2018 | 176 pages

Two authors agree to write the other’s “autobiography” and a reader becomes obsessed with both or only one of them. A man writes his Tinder profile in his mind while a girl speaks to him of death while the objects around them reveal horrible secrets. The “great Chilean poet” destroys a hotel room in Germany and teaches the story’s main character a life lesson. An author named “Patricio Pron” hires a handful of actors to “play Patricio Pron” with predictably catastrophic results.

The characters of Lo que está y no se usa nos fulminará catch a glimpse of what a better life could be and the intensity of that life dazzles them. The vulnerable, the perplexed, the ridiculous, the wise, all come and go on the possibilities intuited in that vision, convinced that if they don't take advantage of the possibilities they’ll be lost: what they find in doing so is random chance, the lives of writers as funhouse mirrors, the opportunity to turn their life into a work of art, the need to disappear, to leave everything behind to become one with literature.

Patricio Pron returns to the short story form to give another lesson on temperance, irony, originality and elegance. Lo que está y no se usa nos fulminará does what every book should do (but almost never achieves): bring you to a place from which you never want to have to return.

RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE

“Compositional wisdom, a sense of pathos on the horizon and, above all, the author’s proverbial ironic and intelligent gaze. Enjoyment that lasts a couple of afternoons then later lingers within.”
— Manuel Rodríguez Rivero, Babelia
“If you already read Pron you’ll find in What Is and Not Used Will Strike Us Down the Rosario-born author’s entire universe, style and obsessions, and if you aren’t, this book is an excellent port of entry. [...] With the reference of his compatriot Ricardo Piglia, who Pron considers his great teacher, Patricio Pron is a unique voice that cannot be overlooked in contemporary literature in Spanish.”
— Luisa Sánchez, El Imparcial
“All is not lost. For anyone who is bored with redundant reading, for those abused by the literature of the obvious or those who can no longer swallow the swill of auto-fiction, there will always by the books by Patricio Pron.”
— Karina Sainz Borgo, Zenda
“A book that is luminous and dark at the same time, full of subtle humor that toward the end (and at some moments) spills over into laughter.”
— Sergio del Molino, Revista Eñe
“It may seem that these stories lead us nowhere. (Although who said that fiction always has to lead us somewhere?) They don’t lead us anywhere that we could imagine or would want to go, that’s true, but they bring us to literature. Or, with extreme aesthetic intelligence, they bring us back to it.”
— Ernesto Ayala Dip, Babelia
“Patricio Pron’s principal virtue as a storyteller is his versatility, the range of options that he handles with short forms. His new book, What Is and Not Used Will Strike Us Down, confirms it: twelve short stories that are twelve different ways of tackling the genre, of showing its plasticity. [...] Pron has written a great book.”
— Edmundo Paz Soldán, La Tercera
“Determined to experiment with his personal bibliography, Pron cuts, copies, mixes, imagines, rehearses, tempts; the result is an impressive collection of short stories. [...] Pron’s form, well worked and put in tension against the more or less stereotyped form of the short story, shows off a wealth of talent.”
— Gerardo Tipitto, Otra Parte