This volume collects four stories by Eduardo Antonio Parra that are already classics of Mexican literature. They represent a selection of what Parra does incomparably: narrate without concessions, without shortcuts; here lies his gift, his touch of grace, but also the arduous work of his art. The reward is the intensity of true metamorphoses, the interior ones.

Through a few characters, we discover here towns and cities, both small and large. They are not landscapes, as in costumbrismo and chronicles, they are worlds. San Buenaventura, Hualahuises, and Ciudad Juárez take on the consistency of all our towns and cities. Because in these stories there are whores and angels, thugs and martyrs, but above all there is the moment of their transformation: when a character reveals themselves so completely that from their abyss they become not only a person, but ours; the difference is the same that distinguishes the words "rememberable" and "memorable." Its present is so intense that it carries with it a vast past, but here customs, practices, and accepted routes return from the point where violence cut them off; without losing for a moment their power of fascination, they narrate an extraordinary moment and create it.