A collection of fourteen stories by the acclaimed Chilean author. Set largely in the world of the Chilean diaspora in Central America and Europe, the narrators of these stories are usually writers grappling with private quests who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witness to a crime.

'Dance Card' provides the reader with sixty-nine reasons not to dance with Pablo Neruda. And the story 'Mauricio ("The Eye") Silva' opens with the following sentence: 'Mauricio Silva, also known as The Eye, always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death.'