Songs for the Flames

Stories

By: Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Anne McLean

Narrated by: Sheldon Romero, Alfredo Huereca

A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, best-selling author Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing - but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces.

A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour-de-force piece, the search for a book leads a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it - and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others. There’s a romantic wistfulness that combusts with the realities of dangerous histories, both personal and political, to throw these characters into the flames from which they either emerge purified, reborn, or burned and destroyed.

©2021 Juan Gabriel Vasquez (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[H]aunting and beautiful...Songs for the Flames is a book about war and imperialism, which in Vasquez’s view never really end, but rather mutate: devolving here into individual traumas paid out over generations, evolving there into state corruption and endless cycles of violence.... [A] book about secrets and lies, which is to say speech acts: their tremendous power, but also the limits of that power and the wretched ecstasy of revelation. Or recognition. Because discovering a secret is not the same as being told one, which is something else again from having a secret to protect.” (New York Times)

“Politics thread throughout this fiercely imagined collection as the Colombian master excavates the aftermath of violent upheaval, characters adrift in dread and wonder.... We’re shocked, shocked by the genius in his craft.” (Oprah Daily)

“The power of [the story] ‘Woman on the Riverbank’ comes from the author’s refusal to create easy drama, his insistence on loose ends taking on a power of their own, his belief that mystery holds a truth that lives beyond fact or beyond simple explanation.” (Electric Literature)