Andrés Neuman - The Things We Don't Do

At this stage in workshops, bringing disorder to order tells more than ordering disorder.

V

The lack of main characters gives birth to the Main Character: the self that narrates itself.

VI

Story upon story, omniscience deserts.

VII

We have become such hybrid authors that any day now we’ll make a purist revolution.

VIII

Dispersal as plot, the random crossing of branches as tree.

IX

The speaker raised to the level of discourse, the narrator as plot.

X

The absolute present as the only history: the short narrative of reset .

XI

From the story with a twist to the story with a doubt.

XII

Some short stories would deserve to end with a semicolon;

Early versions of a few of these stories, in a completely different English translation and often also under another title, appeared in the following magazines: ‘After Elena’, in Granta , translated by Richard Gwyn; ‘A Line in the Sand’, in Words Without Borders, translated by Alison Entrekin; ‘Bathtub’ and ‘Happiness’, in Granta (online), translated by Trevor Stack and Julia Biggane, with the generous collaboration of Ted Hodgkinson; ‘My False Name’, in New Welsh Review, translated by Richard Gwyn; ‘Sor Juana’s Private Hell’ and ‘A Mother Ago’, in The Coffin Factory, translated by Richard Gwyn; ‘The Innocence Test’, in The Lifted Brow, translated by Dario Bard. The author expresses his sincere gratitude to their translators and editors: people who do the things we almost never do. If any of the texts in this volume touches somebody’s heart, that will be thanks to the patient skills of my translators, Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. The mistakes, I’m afraid, were my idea.