Guadalajara: Stories

Monz%C3%B3 (Gasoline) offers fresh takes on literary legends like Kafka's Gregor and Robin Hood in these darkly playful stories. In tidy prose, Monz%C3%B3 embarks on pleasant narratives that swiftly prickle the hair on the back of the reader's neck: in "Family Life," nine-year-old Armand begins to wonder at the strange family ritual of chopping off a child's finger at the age of nine. Is it a barbaric custom or one that actually keeps the family together? In "Outside the Gates of Troy," the soldiers are crammed inside the giant wooden horse, doomed to wait for days before being approached by the Trojans, depleting their supplies and resorting to cannibalism. William Tell's grandson begs his father to re-enact the legendary event of their family ("Wouldn't he too like to join that world of heroes?"), to uncertain outcome; while Gregor the bug ("Gregor"), in a curious switch, wakes up as a fat boy. What if a student, in the middle of taking his exams, as in "Strategies," decides to fail on purpose, or if Robin Hood's altruistic stealing from the rich ("A Hunger and Thirst for Justice") only made the poor greedy and unjust? This collection possesses moments of delicious absurdity and bracing, dark irony. (July)