Lying, Archiving, Surviving: On Fernanda Melchor’s “This Is Not Miami”

WALKING BY HER old elementary school, an unnamed narrator notices the broken pieces of a memorial to a woman found murdered at the site. Fascinated by the case, the narrator unearths newspaper reports claiming that the woman was a government employee who had been kidnapped, but the name on the memorial doesn’t match the name in the reports. Two women dead or disappeared, but only this single, forlorn memorial to two lives otherwise erased from the city.

This vignette, from Fernanda Melchor’s newly translated collection of stories This Is Not Miami, will seem familiar to readers of the author’s novels...