In these nine short stories, absurdity undermines the foundations of reality until there is no turning back:
A boy gets trapped between the walls of a building. / Five friends establish a new country inside their apartment and set out to defend it with their teeth. / The sensual voice of a jazz singer disturbs the life of a musician to the point of driving him mad. / A jaded married couple receives a mysterious black box on their doorstep that will bring them together again. / In the midst of a war that seemed distant, three children and their tutor repeat over and over again the same form of death. / A mobster tells a crime as if it had already happened, but in reality he is anticipating it. / On their honeymoon, a couple of newlyweds get lost in a remote and mysterious village that does not appear on any map and end up involved in a crime that will accompany them for years.
Between the fantastic, the absurd, the extravagant and the crude reality, these short stories are a winding path for the reader to venture into their own stray.
Reviewers say of JM Soto's work:
"Fear, absurdity and helplessness are expressed here through characters who live a shared, paradoxical and essential loneliness that can only emerge in the midst of the collective. Mariano Nava Contreras.
"Wonderful collection of stories stuffed with humanity, desolation and caustic humor; above all, assumed with a comfortable prose and without excesses. Moments without waste through journeys through childhood, through non-existent places, doses of surrealism, micro moments of terror... a shortcut through the most vile emotions, with a consistent influence of visual fables -Gillian, Lynch, Tarantino- that have marked the new generations of the most audacious writers without complexes". Joaquín Ortega.
"We are before a book of high quality, but even more, before a young author who without much fuss exposes a sharp, deep narrative, with characters that allow themselves to be glimpsed in the possibilities of everyday reality. Soto's ideas always seem to be born from a particular image, a scene; but not the one that seems to recreate the story he tells, but the one that hides behind a simple detail of the whole story". Geraudi González..
"A mature author, with expertise, gifted with the art of leading stories and creating characters, and with them to move us, given his ability to maintain the tension and the dramatic arc, in impeccable consonance with the internal verisimilitude". Oscar Marcano.
"His stories maintain tension from beginning to end; there is a clear craft in his prose, and with the brazenness of an author who thinks his work through, his endings leave the reader wanting more and with the possibility that everyone can imagine alternate endings". Librería Sónica
Jesús Miguel Soto is a Venezuelan writer known for his short story collection Perdidos en Frog (2012) and the novels La máscara de cuero (2016), Boeuf (2018) and Finisterre (2024). He has won a number of local and international literary awards. In 2017, Hay Festival selected him as part of Bogotá39: a list of the best young writers in Latin America under forty years old. Since 2024 he lives in United States.
