Pianos on Fire is the first Satanic book in the history of Sonora. And by "Satanic," I don't mean the pseudo-religion that exists only in the fearful, bourgeois mind of the average individual, but rather the impulse opposed to the pusillanimous, the drive for the intellectual over the pedestrian superstition that has infected the West. I'm referring to the spirit of the Titanism of William Blake, of Charles Baudelaire, who live again in the mud-colored body of my friend Carlos Mal. The judges who awarded Carlos Mal the Olive Tree of Parnassus obviously didn't read beyond the first few pages and never realized they were awarding a book about the Devil and about things like the certainty of a world without God or the terror of living surrounded by people who think it's normal to hit each other in the face, about death, about suicide, and about that time he smoked a cigar in front of the Mona Lisa.