What makes us so much in need to tell and so fond of hearing stories? María Teresa Andruetto digs into the recesses of this strange trade and compiles short stories in which there are always libraries and bookshops, dedications and characters, workshops and fairs.

Short stories to shrink sadness, narratives about poor children taking a selfie wearing Flyp Flops shoes, stories about music instruments made with garbage, a word that is able to make a whole text shake, the woman from the Flannery O´Connor tale, who literally bursts with anger and other beautiful anecdotes and short stories in which life is seen as a mirror. The author says: “Nothing of what a writer creates is able to escape from what he or she is. From where could we take the stories, but from the life itself?”.

María Teresa Andruetto’s piety, her wisdom, her conviction that the wild laws sometimes govern people’s behavior could, in some crossroads, be transgressed are like a secret oasis of peace. Liliana Heker

The source of these short stories is an attentive curiosity for what is happening, for the world, without judging, paying tribute to a tradition whose greatest emblem is Montaigne. Diego Tatian

           Extraño oficio expands the chronicle until it frees that bit of life that lights up between pain and joy, between the power of words and the desire to remember. Fabián Soberón

Other books by the same author