What makes an empty room feel like possibility rather than absence? A June conversation with Argentine writer Malén Denis supplied one small, uncomfortable version of that question: a school project involving hollow eggs, and the envy prompted by somebody else’s perfectly emptied shell. In the account of her Lithium reading published by the event’s host, Hola Cultura, an everyday object becomes a way to approach a narrator dissatisfied with her life.
The conversation followed the novel’s English publication by New Directions on February 3, 2026. The edition credits Laura Hatry and John Wronoski as translators from Spanish. At 144 pages, it introduces a young woman negotiating interrupted relationships, insecure living arrangements and efforts to understand painful experiences. This feature follows the publication and the author’s public discussion, rather than presenting a full review of the novel.
The author’s agency catalogue dates Litio to Argentina in 2019 and Spain in 2020. Hola Cultura’s June 25 report describes Denis considering where an individual identity begins and ends, including the role other people play in defining it. The hollow-egg episode belongs to that conversation about comparison and lack. The interest is not simply in possessing another person’s objects, but in wanting the apparent ease with which that person occupies the world.
The novel also follows a body of poetry. The 2025 catalogue from MB Agencia Literaria lists Con una remera de Sonic Youth from 2009, Buscar drogas en Wikipedia from 2014, and two collections from 2017. It identifies Lithium as her first novel. That publishing history makes poetry part of the context for the prose, rather than an incidental item in a biography or a practice the novelist necessarily leaves behind.
New Directions describes Denis as a multidisciplinary artist based between New York and Barcelona. Her training includes philosophy, photography and audiovisual production, as well as a creative-writing MFA at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. The publisher places intimacy and spirituality among the concerns of her work. That background offers context for the questions around space and identity raised at the charla, while leaving readers to discover how the novel gives those questions form.
On the book’s page, Denis characterizes her writing process through images, poetry and psychoanalysis rather than an initial dependence on plot. The observation suggests a useful approach to the new edition: attend to what an object, a room or a comparison makes available for thought. The hollow shell is a modest place to start: the same emptiness can signify achievement or inadequacy. The translation gives another readership a way into that difference.