Fuguet's work is characterized by a United States/Chilean hybridity, with constant cross-references to the popular cultures of the two nations. In 1996 he co-edited (with Sergio Gómez) the anthology McOndo, whose title combined McDonalds with Macondo, the fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez. McOndo represented popular culture while largely rejecting the use of magical realism in contemporary Latin American fiction.

Fuguet's other books are the short story collections Sobredosis and Cortos; the novels Mala onda, Por favor, rebobinar, Tinta roja and Las películas de mi vida; and the non-fiction collection Primera parte. Mala onda, which narrates a week in the life of a Santiago teenager in 1980, has received wide acclaim. Tinta roja has been made into a film. Las películas de mi vida is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Chilean seismologist who grew up in California and later returned to Chile. Its protagonist recounts his life with references to movies he has watched. Some of Fuguet's work, including Mala onda and Las películas de mi vida, has been translated into English and published in the United States.

2007 saw the release of Road Story, a graphic novel illustrated by Gonzalo Martínez based on one of the stories in Cortos. Under the Alfaguara imprint, the book is claimed by Fuguet and by his sometime-collaborator Francisco Ortega to be the first Chilean graphic novel issued by a major publisher.

Selected works

Novels

• Mala onda
• Tinta roja
• Por favor rebobinar
• Las películas de mi vida (2003) Translated in the USA as The Movies of My Life by Harpercollins, 2003

Short stories

• Sobredosis
• Cortos - Translated in the USA as Shorts, HarperCollins in 2005

Graphic novel

• Road Story

Filmography

• 2 horas (2009)
• Se arrienda (2005) (co-written with Francisco Ortega)
• Las hormigas asesinas (2004)
• En un lugar de la noche (aka Dos hermanos) (writer) (directed by Martín Rodríguez, 2000).

Bibliography

• Fuguet, Alberto. "Magical Neoliberalism". Foreign Policy Jul-Aug 2001: 66-73.

Notes