In 1977 "Julia" became one of the 30,000 victims of Argentina's most recent military dictatorship. Julia was a young physician and mother-to-be kidnapped from a medical clinic and found years later in a clandestine grave along with 334 other corpses. Who were those thousands of victims? Who was Julia? By reconstructing Julia's life, Eric Stener Carlson gives voice to the thousands of citizens who were "disappeared." In doing so, he must use the pseudonym "Julia" to protect the people she left behind. Julia's poignant story is told through the emotional memories of childhood friends and family, classmates and colleagues, an ex-lover, and fellow prisoners whose lives intersected with hers in the government torture centers. Interspersed between the personal testimonies are the commentaries of a military general, a priest, a politician, a human rights activist, and a prosecuting attorney in the war crimes tribunal, giving her story a political and social context.
Author
Eric Stener Carlson (Minnesota, 1969) is an author currently based in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote his first book, "I Remember Julia: Voices of the Disappeared" (Temple University Press, 1996), when he was right out of college. It is based on his work with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team identifying the remains of people killed by the military dictatorship in the 1970s. After working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, he wrote his second book, "The Pear Tree: Is Torture Ever Justified?" (Clarity Press, 2006), a very personal investigation into the use of torture and its moral consequences. Eric became a novelist with the publication of "The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires" (Tartarus Press, 2009), a surreal, supernatural mystery. He followed this up with the novel, "Muladona" (Tartarus Press, 2016), "Anxiety of Ghosts" (Amazon, 2017) and his first short story collection, "GAS" (Abraxas Press, 2018). He has a number of other novel projects in the works. His short stories and articles have appeared in journals in the US, UK, Argentina and Spain. Eric holds a BA in International Affairs from The American University, an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He was also a Fulbright scholar affiliated with the University of Buenos Aires. Eric frequently lectures and is always happy to give talks to book clubs and universities.
