Institut Ramon LLull

A man in mourning walks the streets of Barcelona spelling out his lover’s name, a routine hitchhiker imagines himself an urban legend, a stranger brother asks his sibling for a kidney, an addict who wants to move to Las Vegas to quit gambling, a man hoping to rekindle a spark with his best friend’s mother... these are some of the lonely characters who populate these nine stories. They seem to be searching for their place in the world, moving through space but too often looking back in time, nostalgic for a missed opportunity or the way a song once made them feel.

The story that closes the volume plays on the idea of the borders between fiction and nonfiction, and its protagonist, named Jordi Punti, speaks of two types of narrators: the hunter and the fisherman. Hunters head out to find their literary subject matter, like medieval knights, while fishermen just describe the riverbank and wait for a tug on their line. Punti employs both techniques at the same time, setting his forlorn men into motion, while basking in a profusion of subtle, perceptive details.