Contemporary Spanish Short Stories: Viajeros Perdidos

A collection of short stories by 12 contemporary Spanish writers including Javier Cercas and Paloma Diaz-Mas. The settings vary from the exotic (Salome at the court of King Herod, the palace of a Moorish king with a half-mermaid daughter) to the historical (a little boy's experience of life in rural Spain under Franco), the fantastic (travelling the world through a labyrinth of built-in wardrobes) and the Chandleresque "film noir". Each of the stories follows a traveller or travellers, who, in the course of the tale, become lost to reality in some way, or alienated from their expectations and ideals. Sometimes these escapes are temporary, and the protagonist has to return to the everyday world. Sometimes they are permanent. Sometimes the travel is geographical as well as mental. In each case these fugues are metaphors; for contemporary Spanish life in some instances, for the whole of modern experience in others.