An almost sacred place where bodies and souls meet to atone for sorrows, discover desires, and nurture hopes, the cantina is often the propitious space for humans, alone or in company, to express their joys and sorrows, open their hearts to let out confessions, or eliminate those barriers that prevent them from crying outside. And among the thousands of cantinas in Mexico, perhaps the cantina featured in these pages is the best known.

The patrons who occupy the tables at Lontananza are men bent by everyday life, who have perhaps lost everything except the impulse to dream of being the protagonists of their lives: the unemployed person who wants to be the center of attention at the cantina; the scorned lover; the unimaginative poet in search of other people's stories; the bankrupt businessman with new ideas to stay afloat; the one who is sure of winning the lottery; the nostalgic man who returns to his hometown in search of who he once was; and, behind the bar, the bartender Odilón, a witness to it all and at the same time the main character in his own decline. Drawn with precision, subtle irony, and a corrosive sense of humor, each of the beings who cross the swinging doors of this cantina carries a tragedy that will remain in the reader's memory.

With this volume of intertwined short stories, considered by Juan Villoro to be "one of the best short story collections in Latin American literature," the masterful novelist David Toscana restores the cantina's spirit as an ontological refuge and demonstrates that, as a writer, his imagination, mastery of techniques, and narrative originality are not limited to a single genre.