After the 2008 financial crisis in Europe, and the 2010s economic collapse of the Chavista project in Venezuela, Spanish and Venezuelan literary criticism have analysed the role of literature to convey social, economic, and political crisis. I argue that the main underlaying methodological approach in this area stems from ideological criticism: In order to consider a text within the ‘crisis literature cannon’, it must uncover hegemonical ideology, making readers aware of the class relations shaping their reality. However, in this thesis, I ask how, if we consider cynicism as the main ethical ideology of the 2010s, can the role of literature be to make readers aware of the conditions of possibility that they disavow? In order to answer this question, I analyse four Spanish and Venezuelan short fiction, flash fiction, and poetry books from the 2010s and contend that in these books we see what I call wound literature. Following a Lacanian and Hegelian approach, I propose that wound literature attempts to overcome cynicism by reconciling readers with their status as lacking beings. That is, that there is no object that will make (or has made) us whole. This shared concerned with lack and contradiction in the 2010s Spanish and Venezuelan literature help us understand the decade as a moment of global readjustment in the history of capitalism and what the role of literature can be in short-circuiting people’s own investment in the capitalist logic of exploitation.