“Scene 1. Outdoor, daylight. High-angle shot,” she orders mentally.   The impossibly blue spotless sky of the tropic is spattered by a flock of birds, reminding the woman that time still goes by. She absents herself from the world while imagining, and she has been fantasizing for some time now about a curious camera | … |

  At the age of sixteen, Colonel Spencer’s daughter desired only one thing: to pull bunnies out of a hat. That’s why that very afternoon, instead of attending the appointment with the city’s famed couturier, she escaped through the cotton fields and boarded Clementine’s ramshackle car. He greeted her with his full lips and strenuous | … |

Baudelaire would say that every perfect debauch demands perfect leisure. Soon enough, the seats will be taken by a group of gentle men and women of leisure who have paid good money to come here, to get turned on by the sight of our rapture.   We will enter the stage one by one, to | … |

Even specialists find it difficult to unambiguously define the historical novel or, as I prefer to call it, historical fiction. All seem to agree that a historical fiction must take place in the past, must principally involve at least one real-life character, and must include some level of ambiance reconstruction. The agreements appear to only | … |

  When the end of the world began, Héctor was intertwined with Cyrille, Bartolomé with Amaury, and Celeste with Ananda and Idelisa. I, on the other hand, thought of Jack Veneno. I had first seen him wandering about El Conde in yellow spandex, with his eyes sparkling and his blood turned to rum, when he | … |

  Lento e pianissimo. This is the window of a studio. At this moment he is facing the blank. Allegro. She, a contrabassist by trade, enters suddenly. She looks worried, anxious to begin rehearsing. Work is pressing. She takes the bow, paces from side to side, checks the scores, selects some pages and clips them | … |

I keep a crystal-clear memory from the day it began. I go back to it often. Remembrance is more of a matter of exerting will than memory, a decision made on the very instant, as it elapses. I had spent the entire afternoon trying to break my own record for straight skips with the old | … |

  I reckon the man must have lost his way the night before and walked all day long, if he has appeared here now. I don’t know what the poor devil is doing in this scrap of the world and the desert has taught me to distrust: in the end, it all comes down to | … |