The attentive reader of this volume will not fail to experience a certain glare after finishing its short stories. On a first impression he or she will corroborate that Venezuelan short-form narrative maintains an essential distance from criollista chronicle, following the course of an eminent domain of renewed relevance. And, on the other hand, he or she will have the inevitable sensation that the chosen authors coincide in a finished stylistic proposal at the moment of articulating their anecdotes, which gain their profiles from the rigorous guidelines of the genre.
In this manner, the structural conception of the nine short stories gathered here (which are a product of the annual call for contributions for the SACVEN contest), tends to be conceived from the economy of resources used with a clean prose, up to the subtle working of the short stories’ times or the effective parody of literary genres, among other expressive possibilities. Likewise, all fictions have in common the city as absolute setting, giving us a glimpse —in characters that are versatile, complex, often extraordinary and elaborated in the temperance of a well-made action juncture— of audacious, suggestive themes, such as betrayal, decadence and squalor, eroticism, unforeseen deaths or extreme violence.
— Miguel Gomes