'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.