Songs for the flames : stories

Author

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Call Number

• FICTION VASQ (CEN)

Publication Information

New York : Riverhead Books, 2021.

Physical Description

240 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

"A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vasquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence -- sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing -- but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire, and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour de force piece, the search for a book leds a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it -- and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan. Juan Gabriel Vásquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others. There's a romantic wistfulness that combusts with the realities of dangerous histories, both personal and political, to throw these characters into the flames from which they either emerge purified, reborn, or burned and destroyed"--

Notes

Translated from the Spanish.

First published in the Spanish language as Canciones para el incendio by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. A. U., in 2019. First published in English by MacLehose Press in 2020.

Contents

• Woman on the riverbank
• Gouble
• Frogs
• Bad news
• Us
• Airport
• Boys
• Last corrido
• Songs for the flames.