'Here's the world for you, son, clean and cruel, fragrant and rotten, sincere and deceiving, give it to me new, come on, run'Playful, philosophising and gloriously unpredictable, Andrés Neuman's short stories consider love, lechery, history, mortality, family secrets, therapy, Borges, fallen nuns, translators and storytelling itself.Here a relationship turns on a line drawn in the sand; a chaste poet and a drunken womaniser swap places; a discovery in a secondhand shop takes on a cruel significance; a man decides to go to work naked one day. In these small scenes and brief moments Neuman confounds our expectations with dazzling sleight of hand. These stories - the first ever collection of Neuman's in English - are told with a voice that is wry, questioning, sometimes mordantly funny yet always generously humane.

Inspired by Borges and Cortzar, and echoing Vila Matas and Zarraluki, Neuman regards both life and literature's big subjects - identity, relationships, guilt and innocence, the survival of extreme circumstances, creativity and language - with a quizzical, philosophical eye. Shining from the page with both irony and mortal seriousness, these often tragicomic 'stories of ideas' vacillate between the touching and the absurd, in the best tradition of Spanish storytelling. This is the first ever English collection of Neuman's short fiction, containing thirty-five short stories and four sets of 'Twelve Rules for a Storyteller'. Neuman was born in Buenos Aires in 1977, and grew up and lives in Spain. The son of Argentinian musicians, he has published numerous novels, short stories, essays and poetry collections. Pushkin Press also publishes his novels Talking to Ourselves and Traveller of the Century which was awarded the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and shortlisted for the Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.