The essay production of Alan Pauls is based on a mode of reading that erases the boundaries between art and life, considering them as manifestations of the same practice. In his insistence on writing about the aestheticized existence of transgressive writers, Pauls constructs a poetics of dissidence that allows him to singularize in an identity that denies itself because it’s based on a policy that abjures monolithic identities such as the one that the figure of “national writer” assumes. Manuel Puig, deconstructor of authoritarianisms, appears insistently in Pauls’ essays: he is the specular icon of his writing.