Two writers agree to each write the “autobiography” of the other, and a reader becomes obsessed with one or both of them. A man mentally composes his Tinder profile while a little girl talks to him about death and the horrible secrets that things tell. The “Great Chilean Poet” destroys a German hotel room and offers his spokesperson a life lesson. A writer named “Patricio Pron” hires a handful of actors to “play Patricio Pron,” with predictably catastrophic results. The characters in What Lies Unused Will Vanquish Us have a glimpse of a better life, and its intensity dazzles them. Vulnerable, perplexed, ridiculous, and wise, they all return repeatedly to the possibilities hinted at in that vision, convinced that if they dont take advantage of them, they will be lost: what they find, though, is chance, the lives of writers as funhouse mirrors, the chance to turn their lives into works of art, the need to disappear, to leave it all behind to be one with literature.